Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference – Day 2
Posted Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
Today’s keynotes varied between thought-provoking and mind numbing. Ben Stein, noted comic economist, opened the day with a cogent overview of the current financial crisis and how it came about. He followed this with a listing of the country’s problems, a touching personal story and then wrapped it all into a simplistic solution: help make good families. No ideas on how, but certainly it was entertaining.
The second keynote was a panel of BI guys from Accenture, Dell, HP, Profit Base and Hitachi being asked "What will BI look like in 2020?". Kill me. The answers were about what you’d expect – "blah, blah, blah…and that’s why Dell/HP/Accenture/whatever is a particularly good solution for blah, blah, blah". After the Accenture guy coined the term Information Resource Planning ("IRP"), I bailed to prevent any inadvertent vomiting from hitting the guy seated in front of me. Really, does this industry need one more fill-in-the-blank-resource-planning acronym?
Content today was, in a word, rock solid. Here’s what I did:
Data Mining with Excel: Okay, this sounds a dry as can be…but WOW! The presenter covered the use of Excel’s Data Mining add in to do predictive analysis on example data sets. Where this should be of interest to all of IBIS’s clients is the power to mine your existing ERP and CRM data (even better with CRM, but if you have Analysis Cubes for Excel installed with GP, it would work great) with an easy to use predictive analysis tool the better to identify hidden relationships and trends in customer buying behavior. When coupled with basket analysis ("when x bought y, what else did they buy") and category analysis ("what do people that upgrade to X have in common"), you really, really get fast information you can leverage into tighter, more focused marketing behavior. Best of all, you own this stuff already with MS Office.
Strategic Planning and Scorecards for PPS: This entire conference is really about three things: SQL 2008, Excel and PPS. PPS really is showing well in two areas: consolidating and controlling Excel based planning and budgeting sheets, and fast dashboard construction of analysis data in Analysis Services, Excel, SQL Tables, etc. This session was a little dry, but great to see the entire life cycle from plan to report.
Leveraging Your Business Intelligence Applications in Sharepoint: In case you think BI is only a huge ticket item, think again. Using basic Excel\WSS or Excel\MOSS, you can easily create awesome team template sites that have built in KPI and Metric functionality from a data source as easily managed as a Sharepoint-mounted Excel workbook.
Hands on Labs: MS did an amazing job on these. I spent about 3 hours in the lab working on Excel dashboards, Excel Services and Performance Point Dashboard construction. From them, I take away the following points:
- Everyone running GP and CRM needs to be using Analysis Services and Excel. Period. Its the best data mining and dashboarding tool every put into the hands of the end user. Ever. Period. Really.
- Excel Services and MOSS: Done right, this solves all the problem related to mailing around Excel worksheets or storing them on a network. You can centrally store them, see them in a web page, pull out only individual elements (like a single chart) for display, bury segments into a Sharepoint KPI, and the list goes on. Small clients can buy this off the Dynamics price list fairly inexpensively and if you are BRL AM you already own a lot of it.
- PPS Dashboards: This is where you should start with PPS, if you laid in the foundation of Analysis Services. However, you can also use Excel, SQL Tables, Sharepoint Lists and any ODBC datasource as a dashboard datasource so its not a hard requirement.
Tomorrow is going to be more HOL and sessions and I’ll do a wrap post. For those of you coming to iSight, I look forward to talking to you about all this stuff in person.
Dwight
Posted in Business Intelligence, Reporting, SQL
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