What is Business Intelligence?
Most organisations amass vast amounts of data, which may be
spread across disparate systems in different parts of the business.
Within this data will be gems of information that have the
potential to aid strategic planning, performance management,
decision support and day-to-day operations.
Business Intelligence (BI) unlocks this information, providing
timely access to the right people, at the right time, in the right
format.
What benefits can I expect from BI?
A complete overview of the business: our BI
solutions can incorporate data from disparate data sources (ERP,
CRM and other line of business applications), providing a seamless
view of your organisational information.
More immediate access to pertinent information:
a combination of dashboards, Role Centres, analytical tools and
automated reporting served up via your browser, intranet or
smartphone.
Helps you to help yourself: self-service
analytical and reporting tools to lower the burden on IT and reduce
your reliance on IT partners.
Leverage your infrastructure investment: our
solutions run on the Microsoft BI Stack. In most cases you will
have adequate infrastructure to start looking at BI solutions.
Why the Microsoft BI stack?
An industry trend in Business Intelligence is that business
requirements change at a higher rate than IT departments can keep
up with. This is at odds with many BI vendors, whose approach is
IT-based. Microsoft's approach to BI is to provide self-service
tools to empower the users, and to dovetail its BI tools into IT
infrastructure, resulting in "managed self-service". Microsoft BI
tools, part of its Business Productivity Suite, are familiar and
easily adopted by users.
Another industry trend is that information workers are spending
a disproportionate amount of time searching for the information
they need. Microsoft's BI stack includes SharePoint Server, its
principal intranet technology. When delivered via SharePoint, BI
can leverage the collaboration and search features in the product
to provide truly compelling solutions.
These factors have resulted in Microsoft being acknowledged by
Gartner Group as a Leader in the Business Intelligence
Platforms Magic Quadrant.