Dearth of Innovation in Business Intelligence Technology, Finally Addressed

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) September 7, 2010 -- All that is changing now. Microsoft is releasing SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 that include the PowerPivot technology innovations. In addition to the 2010 versions of SharePoint and Office, you will also need a piece of server side technology from the SQL 2008 R2 release to implement the PowerPivot server capabilities. That’s right, technology from SharePoint, the Office client and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) that integrate to deliver a game changing new business intelligence capability for Microsoft customers.

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Dearth of Innovation in Business Intelligence Technology, Finally Addressed

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This signals the reversal in a long standing tension between the SQL product group and the Office team over the importance of Excel as a business intelligence tool. Excel has had integration between the pivot table feature and SSAS for years, but there was little real innovation since then. As a longtime proponent of SSAS, we can’t count the number of times that Cognos (now IBM) and Hyperion (now Oracle) customers would ridicule pivot tables compared to the Excel add-ins provided by their BI vendors. I was having troubled selling the Microsoft OLAP server because proponents of the competition were highlighting the primitive capabilities of Excel on the client side.

The latest round of product development shows that things are improving. The various product groups are planning and delivering coordinated engineering that will make a difference to customers. There is a lot of confusion leading up to the launch of PowerPivot regarding what business problems this technology will solve. I recently read a long discussion on the LinkedIn site where most respondents “don’t get it”. I have been having a lot of conversations with customers about PowerPivot and one of the roles that is sparking interest is how PowerPivot can excel (pardon the pun) in prototype development. Before I get into that detail let me say a few words about how prototypes get developed without PowePivot?

The business starts with an idea for a tool for analyzing data in a unique way. This is often prompted by the decision to purchase a data product from an outside source. The business comes to IT and says, “I really need to merge this data with a)CRM, b)ERP, c) other third party databases or d) all of the above. IT says “show me your requirements”. Here is where the trouble begins. The communication of requirements from the business to IT is the major roadblock to realizing more successful BI initiatives. The business analysts think IT is too slow in reacting to changing requirements and IT believes that the business is incapable of making decisions that won’t change tomorrow. The result is that everyone walks away frustrated or something gets built but not used.

PowerPivot can be a powerful BI prototyping environment that can change the dynamics of requirements gathering and refinement. IT can train business users how to use PowerPivot and facilitate the use of the technology so the majority of the prototype investment cost being is incurred by the business and not IT . This is the first step in moving toward what has been called self service BI. To fully realize the potential of the technology, IT has to be involved at both beginning and the end of the prototype development but the most difficult aspects of deciding what to put in and leave out is left in the hands of the business decision makers.

So how does it work with PowerPivot? IT first provides one or more tabular data feeds to the business analyst. This can be accomplished with read-only connections to source database systems (see the PowerPivot documentation for a list of support sources) or though simple flat file transfers. Remember, we’re in the prototype stage so don’t spend a lot of time automating something that may still need a lot of refinement. The responsibility for defining what needs to be in the data feeds lies with the business users. If there’s uncertainty about what is available, reliable, and/or manageable, IT needs to help the business resolve those questions. IT then shows the business how to make relationships between the data sources using the PowerPivot in-memory database engine. Once the business has the data feeds it needs joined in PowerPivot, it’s time for them to go to work independently of IT. The use of other basic functions such as adding a calculate column, doing look-ups from spreadsheet objects, etc. can either start in IT and be transferred to the business or if there is a strong Excel skill base that already exists in the business analyst community the role of IT in training can be reduced. Using the capabilities of PowerPivot, business analysts can pivot data from multiple source systems, add additional characteristics that are currently not tracked in any source system, calculate numerical metrics and create output formats all without the need for IT resources. At the end of the process, the business can either approach IT with a functioning prototype to get assistance in creating an enterprise ready solution or they can continue to use and develop the model through additional iterations.

One question you may ask is “will the business analysts and management take on this level of prototype development?” The correct answer is “only if it’s important enough to them”. Taking this approach will help solve another problem with the current business requirements driven approach to BI prototype development - too many resources are wasted when the business under invests in documenting requirements and IT begins development based on their best guess.

More information can be found online at http://www.winwire.com/PowerPivot

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