Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Defining Business Intelligence for Your Organization

What is business intelligence for your organization? Great question. We would all like to run our business (and our lives) intelligently, so how do we define, find, and create a system to make this easier? Business intelligence, also sometimes known as business performance management, is the presentation of information that is pertinent and meaningful to each user and role in an organization. According to Microsoft, their combination of software provides the business intelligence tools to transform data into information and information creates knowledge for users to take action on. That is a great concept, but sometimes it is easier to consume by considering the problems that BI is trying to solve:

• Consolidation of data sources: Most organizations, even small ones, have several different systems to support their business. Typically these systems include a customer relationship management (CRM) database, accounting and payroll system, employee time tracking system, an inventory and asset database, issue or bug tracking database, and human resource database. These systems vary based on the type and size of the organization, but regardless of the number, it is easy to create business efficiencies by consolidating the data. For example, the employee is a key piece of data for the payroll system, the employee time tracking system, and the human resource database. Instead of looking in three places for each portion of the employee ...