Knight's Microsoft® Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer: Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server® Integration, Analysis, and Reporting Services with Excel® and SharePoint®

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Why Business Intelligence?

Congratulations on your choice to explore how Business Intelligence can improve your orga-

nization’s view into its operations and uncover hidden areas of profitability and analysis. The

largest challenges most organizations face around their data are probably mirrored in yours.

Challenges include:

Data is stored in a number of different systems on different platforms,

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such as inventory

and logistics in SAP, financials in Oracle, web analytics in SQL Server, and manufacturing

on the mainframe. This can make data difficult to get to, require multiple accounts for

access, and keep teams and departments at arm’s length from each other.

Pockets of knowledge about the data are spread throughout teams that don’t regularly

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interact. This spread causes data to be analyzed in different ways and metrics to be cal-

culated inconsistently, which, in turn, leads to unpredictable analysis and inappropriate

actions being taken based on the data.

Documentation is limited or nonexistent.

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Many times documentation is not created for

reports or the metadata underneath them, and this lack of documentation is a critical

problem. If you don’t know where the data is coming from for the report, or how certain

metrics are being calculated, then you can’t truly understand or communicate the value

of the data and calculations.

Consolidated reporting is very time-consuming, when ...