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Approaching Performance Management Business Intelligence Dashboards Using Microsoft Technology stack By Sudhanshu Hate Microsoft Technology Centre October 2006 INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED, Bangalore. Document No. : Authorized by: MTC-Sols Version. Rev: 0.8 Signature/: Date 22nd April. 06 1. Introduction...................................................................................................................................3 2. Performance Management problem statement..............................................................................3 3. Approach towards solving the problem ........................................................................................4 3.1 Prescriptive High level Architecture..................................................................... 5 3.2 360 degree view of enterprise through Balanced Scorecards ............................... 6 3.3 Predictability ......................................................................................................... 6 3.4 Responding to Dynamic Business needs .............................................................. 6 3.5 KPI Tracking and closure-“Close the loop” Ability ............................................. 7 3.6 Information availability anytime anywhere .......................................................... 8 3.7 Personalization-..................................................................................................... 9 3.8 Flexibility in report creation- ................................................................................ 9 4. Limited adoption of performance dashboards within the enterprise ............................................9 5. BI evolution in Microsoft technology stack................................................................................10 6. Microsoft roadmap for other products in BI space .....................................................................13 7. Approaching multi-vendor BI platforms ....................................................................................14 8. Key Solution offerings................................................................................................................15 9. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................15 10. References- .................................................................................................................................16 MTC-Sols 1. Introduction Embarking on development of Business Performance Management application is a challenge for an enterprise. This paper tries to cover the most frequently encountered requirements in development of business performance management applications along with the Infosys recommended solution based approach to resolve these requirements using Microsoft technology stack. 2. Performance Management problem statement Performance management with an enterprise becomes extremely tricky when one has to track key performance indicator from different business functions which has performance data to be aggregated from different native data sources. Following are some of the key issues from Enterprise performance management 1. Lack of 360 degree view Strategic managers lack 360 degree view of business. Tactical and Operational managers fail to obtain 360 degree view of specific business operation or an entity. This happens not due to inappropriate or insufficient data within the system but because of unavailability of data at right time and right place through right medium. Data is scattered in different system relational and non-relational unstructured formats, and it is difficult to get the unified and consistent view of any specific entity. E.g. Customer information is being created in Billing, Order, Customer management and other systems, but still if a customer relationship manager wants to find out a particular customer orders received, orders delivered, bills paid, and customer issues raised at a particular instance. It is impossible to dig and stitch through the silos of information. 2. PredictabilityOne of the key aspects of Performance management is about predictability. Things like ability to know which customers would be important to generate revenues, which business units would bring in increased sales, and so on are important for business continuity. For business to be competitive and successful amongst its competitors, it may need to plan various focused marketing campaigns • To increase sales • To readily identify potential customers to target • Plan various marketing campaigns around specific customer segments • Measure the benefits of marketing campaigns so that it can be compared with the baseline objectives Performance management systems that enable similar to these operations would be key to business success. 3. Responding to dynamic business environment- MTC-Sols In business, often product discounts need to be based on the various market dynamics like competitors product positioning, results from marketing campaigns, government policies and so on. 4. KPI tracking and closureSeveral times, business manager identify a problem, but lacks approach and technology availability to break down and track the problem, ensure its completion and measure the results at various milestones. 5. Availability of information anytime anywhereUsers are spread over territories and several users have different constraints on the medium through which they can consume the data. It is difficult to have the standardization on the medium to consume the data, but at the same time information availability at various places in correct form is critical for faster decision making. While the above are key concerns, other common functions that all Performance management application need are 6. Personalization – Data should be only visible to the right person. 7. Flexibility in report creation -Business needs certain canned reports, at the same time needs the ability where by they can quickly create certain reports and share it with teams, without approaching every time Information technology department. 8. Automated report delivery -Ability to schedule report on email or shared location timely as well as on trigger of any business event e.g. ‘Reorder’ level for certain inventory item has reached. 9. Intuitive User interface – Through intuitive user interfaces with appropriate indicators, user attention should be drawn to only key summary information. Additionally from summarized data, user should be provided an ability to drill down to next level of detail. Additionally all implementations are expected to be: • Dollar efficient cost of implementation • Systems should be available as early as possible for business users • Transitioning users to use new systems should be as seamless as possible 3. Approach towards solving the problem Infosys Performance Management Business Intelligence solution helps all three Strategic, Tactical and Operational levels of users manage Performance through Business Intelligence Dashboard. Business intelligence (BI) is the means by which enterprise interpret the sea of data to derive insights that are critical in competing in the new economy by enabling business users gain a better & deeper understanding to track the key measures of the business, and then by translating these MTC-Sols insights into action, business can improve bottom-line, respond more quickly to changing market demands. 3.1 Prescriptive High level Architecture The prescribed indicative architecture is as follows: Figure 2 - High level Architecture Since the data exists in the disparate relational and non- relational databases SQL Server, Oracle, Legacy DB2 databases, XML, Excel files, and the data is also received from various web services. For unified view of information to end user it is important to pick and choose, cleanse, apply rules of the business, stage and verify the data. SQL Server 2005 Integration services through appropriate usage of adapter to connect to these varied data sources, retrieve, massage data and then load into a data warehouse. The business user needs to analyze the data on multiple dimensions to get to various data points, e.g. what are Mr. X’s orders received, delivered, bills paid, and issues raised during Oct. to Dec. 2005. Relational models are non perform-ant and inefficient as the degree of dimensions increases. Multi dimensional cubes on fact and dimension based dimensional models are created using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. These Analysis Services based OLAP cubes helps user in drilling down into information of specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). MTC-Sols KPIs are key measures of the business; business manager would like to track. Examples are ‘Total Sales’/‘Net Profit’/’’Customers added’/’ Total Issues raised’ in particular quarter. Various online and OLAP Reports can be created using SQL Server 2005 reporting services, which further can be exposed to multiple delivery channels. 3.2 360 degree view of enterprise through Balanced Scorecards To enable efficient performance management within an enterprise it is essential for Strategic, Tactical and Operational managers to obtain 360 degree view into exiting operations. Balanced scorecards provide view into business from various perspectives. Perspectives help in monitoring the specific business area. E.g. Corporate Performance management application has multiple perspectives like “Financial”, “Business process”, “Customer” and “Employee”. Monitoring KPIs around these perspectives will help in improving managing the business performance from all key stakeholder perspective. The KPI hierarchy is useful from organizing various KPIs within perspectives. Reports can be linked to KPIs so that users can move from summarized data to detail level data. The Scorecards can be created for each of the perspective. Scorecards provide information for a group of KPIs. The KPIs show actual values for measures against target established with appropriate indicators (red/green/yellow) so that business users can quickly identify the problem. Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager helps in creating and organizing various KPIs. Each of these KPIs displayed through functional hierarchy can be added under appropriate perspective. Further alerts can be set on this KPIs for alerting the manager for any changes in KPI state (red/yellow/green).Detail Data associated with these KPIs can be provided by associating reporting services reports with KPIs. 3.3 Predictability Predictive analytics and trending is essential for identifying trends from sea of data which otherwise is difficult to establish by naked eyes. E.g. Understanding the patterns of customer spending, trends in sales cycles, etc. SQL Server 2005 data mining algorithms helps to establish trends from data by first creating the model based on existing data mining algorithms like ‘Sequence Clustering’, ’Association’, ’Naïve byes’ etc. Once these models are created and trained. Predictive results can be obtained by feeding data to these models. By leveraging SQL Server 2005 Decision Tree, Sequence clustering data mining algorithms to readily identify the patterns of customer spending to select specific segments of customer. This reduces the time in identifying such data patterns through naked eye and decisions are based on data than gut feel, in turn accuracy of decisions increases. 3.4 Responding to Dynamic Business needs Tactical and Operational business demands to respond to market changes on the fly. MTC-Sols e.g. Scenarios like “Running successful customer focused campaigns”, “Authorizing customer specific discounts”, “Triggering stock purchase based on orders and inventory levels”, and similar such scenarios need decision making on real time data analysis. Performance Management Dashboards can display dynamic data through appropriate implementation of technologies at different layer of architecture. User Interface can implement ‘AJAX’ based java script framework for providing automated refresh of screens to display dynamic changes in data. At Data warehouse layer Real time analysis of data can be enabled through setting the Analysis Services cubes for Proactive caching, so that as soon as the data in OLTP system is updated the Cube gets a notification from SQL Notification services and can process it self automatically to refresh with the updated data. SQL Integration Services can also fed data directly to cubes rather than populating the intermediate data warehouse and thus providing real time data availability. 3.5 KPI Tracking and closure-“Close the loop” Ability Often Performance Management solution lacks the capability to track the KPI and put together an action plan to improve upon KPI results, called as ‘Close the loop’ ability. The business manager once identify problem, creates an improvement program to resolve the problem, As part of improvement program the manager can break down the problem in to various action items or tasks, delegate those tasks to users, track to ensure progress, then measure and compare results, also improvise program if required at defined milestones. e.g. Total Sales is falling down consistently, after analyzing the sales on dashboard, it is found that sales in ‘North’ is falling while other regions are meeting their targets. Once the ‘North’ region is identified for sales fall, managers can create “Improvement Programs’. In this case the improvement program would be “Increasing sales in North region”, as part of this improvement program the users can create and assign various actions or tasks like “Plan and execute weekly radio advertisements for next 3 months on local radio channels”, “Provide discounts on bulk purchases”, “Provide home delivery on bulk purchases” and so on. All these action items can be assigned to different individuals and asked them to plan and execute those. At monthly milestones, sales from each of the area in “North” region can be collated and compared with baseline results to see the trends. If the trends are as per expectations, the campaigns can be continued or else tweaked to improve results. Having the Framework and technology to plan, execute, track and measure this is significant from business perspective. MTC-Sols 3.6 Information availability anytime anywhere Making information available to business users through the most desirable medium is one of the most important aspects. Performance Management solution realizes this by providing information through various delivery channels like 1. Custom built ASP.Net sites – Dashboards can be custom built using ASP.net framework. Infosys Speed entity framework helps in creating various layer level entities in an automated manner. 2. Share Point Portal (SPS) – Provides portal interface, out of the box web parts available from SPS helps building nice and intuitive user dashboards. Reports built using SQL Reporting Services, Office web components and Scorecards created using Business Scorecard Manager can be published on SharePoint Portal server using appropriate web parts. 3. Smart client applications – End user needs rich user interface experience with ease of deployment and management. One of the reasons why thick client applications are not preferred ones is because of pain in upgrading the each client desktop version. With Smart client, users can benefit from rich user interface functionality developed using Windows forms based Composite UI application block (CUIB) and ease of automated deployment with click once. 4. PDA/mobile – Information availability anytime anywhere can be realized by making the reports available to end user through PDA. Infosys “mConnect” framework helps in ensuring the reports can be accessed through range of devices without compromising the formatting and display of data. 5. Microsoft Office – Business user have to deal with huge set of numbers through Microsoft excel. Data pivoting, slicing/dicing, filters on to cubes through excel environment will help in MTC-Sols leveraging users years of experience with office tools. Performance management solution ensures the information available through intuitive reports, graphs, pivot charts from office environment 3.7 Personalization- As part of Performance Management it is important that users should be able to view the data only specific to their KPIs ensuring appropriate isolation levels. ASP.Net or Share point web part based implementation with access to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services cube at dimension and member level helps ensuring Right data visible to right user. 3.8 Flexibility in report creation- Empowering business users to create their day to day reports is essential not only for IT to focus on other important functions but also for fulfilling immediate reporting needs of business. Business can be enabled to create their own reports by exposing appropriate data entities, views, and cubes through Report Model project of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Users can drag and drop these various entities, provide appropriate naming to columns, choose report type like tabular, matrix, drill down, etc. and author reports and deliver it to reporting services server for peer or self repetitive consumption. 4. Limited adoption of performance dashboards within the enterprise Implementation of business intelligence performance dashboard is considered very costly and hence adoption of it has only happened in key business areas like Strategic decision making. While Reporting is implemented at Tactical and Operational level, it is not enough to satisfy the needs of tactical and operational business needs. While business wants to adopt Performance management dashboards across the enterprise, the cost of implementation is usually a big hindrance. Cost gets rocketing when a final solution needs to be based on technologies from multiple vendors. It was difficult to find one vendor that provides decent end to end Business intelligence functionality through its technology stack. It would be important to look at the Forrester’s opinion. Following is the extract from one of the Forrester’s report – (Reference to be provided) “There is no vendor having proven production platform which delivers all the BI functionality in 3 important categories-analytic, enterprise, and business for all five user community –IT, power users, business users, casual users and extended enterprise users” Some of the issues with leading BI vendors are: MTC-Sols 1. They have different licensing policy, the license cost for each one of them comes close to a million USD per license, although this is just indicative and varies base on what flavor of product the customer is buying and nature of license. 2. Using these vendor tools calls for higher learning curve and accordingly more investment in training business users, development teams in using the applications based on custom built user interfaces. 3. Question on stability of there product stack considering the current acquisition drive 4. Sometime business feels these products as overkill for their size implementations Microsoft provides complete Performance management Dash boarding functionality through its technology stack at a very competitive price helping an organization to adopt performance management dashboards in all the areas of business increasing business competitiveness and agility. It would be interesting to look at how Business Intelligence functionality has evolved in Microsoft product stack. 5. BI evolution in Microsoft technology stack Microsoft introduced business intelligence in its product stack, when it shipped SQL Server 2000. SQL Server 2000 has • • • Data Transformation Services (DTS) for integrating data from different data sources Analysis Services 2000 for creating cubes and limited functionality in Data mining through two algorithms ‘Decision Trees’ and ‘Clustering’. Reporting Services, for creating reports was introduced a bit late, in first quarter of 2003, which got added as an add-on in SQL Server 2000 stack. With this stack, implementing a fair amount of Business Intelligence functionality was possible, and most of the small-to-medium size businesses that were Microsoft shops have started using this for implementing BI. While SQL Server 2000 started attracting customers, SQL Server 2005 has started making inroads into enterprises critical information systems. NASDAQ is using SQL Server 2005 for real time trade broking and querying handling 5000 transactions per second, which shows how SQL Server 2005 is used in large transactional mission critical applications. NASDAQ case study can be accessed from http://members.microsoft.com/CustomerEvidence/Search/EvidenceDetails.aspx?Evide nceID=13793&LanguageID=1 Microsoft has further strengthened its BI offering by releasing SQL Server 2005 in early November 2005. Microsoft invested huge amount of effort in research and development to improve it’s offering in Business Intelligence space. • SQL Server 2000 DTS has a significant limitation in terms of scaling in Enterprise scenarios. MTC-Sols SQL Server 2000 DTS is completely re-architected and re-written into SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) and has significant changes towards betterment in architecture and also in realizing data integration functionality needed at enterprise ETL level. SSIS architecture removes the need of data staging for cleansing of data. • SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services is based on Unified dimensional modeling approach, which resolves numerous business scenarios out of the box, some of them are User can provide meaningful user friendly names to business entities Translations feature helps convert data in to users regional language Currency conversions are done based on user’s regional settings Ability to create calculated columns. SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services cubes can be based one and only one fact tables, has restriction on the number of Dimensions and attributes hierarchy a Cube can have, limiting user analytical capability. In SQL 05, this is increased multifold to account for large Enterprise complex Business Intelligence system, a single cube can be based on multiple fact tables and now Architects don’t need to model virtual cube to account this limitation of SQL Server 2000. Proactive caching helps realizing near real time business intelligence. Five more data mining algorithms (‘Time Series’, ‘Naïve Bayes’, ’Association’, ‘Sequence Clustering’, ‘Neural Networks’) are added to help business identify trends and improve forecasting and decision-making. • SQL Server 2005 reporting services builds on the earlier version of Reporting and provides enhanced offering in all the three areas of reporting ‘Authoring’, “Management’ and ‘Delivery’. Report Builder helps user create ad-hoc reports through entities published using Report model and then by dragging and dropping various entities, creating summary and computed columns, saving and publishing the report for the consumption of external world. Reports can be subscribed to email or can be delivered to share network location based on rule set. The rule can be based on time or on the event of update of data in underlying database. MTC-Sols Figure 1 – SQL Server 2005 technology stack For any Performance Management implementation, Data warehouse is a key component. The key prerequisites of Data warehousing platform is Scalability, Performance, Availability, Security, Management and Administration. SQL Server 2005 Relational database platform has undergone major improvements from Database Architecture, Security, Availability, Scalability, Management and Administration perspective. 1. CLR Integration within database helps to develop stored procedures using CLR based languages like C#, and VB.Net helping improve performance of computation based code also giving developers choice of writing it in the language they are comfortable with. 2. SQL Server 2005 has XML data type which helps in managing XML data. 3. Very High Database availability can be achieved through Database Mirroring and Database clustering. 4. Unlike SQL Server 2000, now in SQL Server 2005 a particular data file can be taken offline, also Indexes can be rebuilt in online manner improving data availability. 5. SQL Server 2005 can expose data through web services without any support from Internet Information Server (IIS). 6. SQL Server 2005 is secure by deployment, by default SQL Installation has min. surface area exposure, meaning SQL Server 2005 has least number of services running on start up and administrator will have to explicitly start services on demand. 7. By default SOAP transport is encrypted, encryption algorithms are improved and if required third party encryption algorithms can be used. 8. Database administration is simplified in SQL Server 2005 using single tool SQL Server Management studio unlike three different tools in SQL Server 2000. 9. Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) provides database administrators insights into various activities within the database. And this list can go on and on. MTC-Sols How much it costs to have Business Intelligence add in SQL Server 2005? It costs zero dollars for business intelligence functionality as all the Business intelligence services SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) are bundled in to SQL Server 2005 database license, which costs approximately 30,000 USD per CPU, although this may vary over time and also based on the license policy. The details of SQL Server licensing can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.mspx 6. Microsoft roadmap for other products in BI space Microsoft continues to do heavy investment in research and development in Business Intelligence tools and technologies. BI is one of the important focus areas at Microsoft, also evident from one of its recent acquisition of Proclarity (www.Proclarity.com). ProClarity dashboards are rich user interface dashboards. Once integrated in Microsoft stack, it will help creation of quick rich user interfaces analytical dashboard. Office 12, next version of Microsoft Office slated to be released in first quarter of 2007, currently available as beta is strengthening business users’ ability to do multi dimensional analysis in Office environment. The cubes, KPIs created as part of SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services is available within Excel through OLAP connection and user can Pivot, un-Pivot, slice and dice information through there most friendly interface. The user privileges setting on Analysis Services can be leveraged in Excel12 environment. One of the important differentiator from earlier way of doing excel based BI is “Excel12 based workbooks can be published on office server”, preventing multiple versions of excel floating in the enterprise. For modifying excel workbooks, users can check out and check in these excel from SharePoint server. SharePoint’s new version SharePoint v3 is bundled as part of Office 12 and has strong improvements from portal, workflow, content management, web parts, business intelligence and collaboration perspective. Since this version of Sharepoint is built on .Net framework, the interoperability between sharepoint and .net components is seamless. ASP.Net pages can be hosted in Sharepoint. Share Point v3 based sites can be exposed as Internet applications and supports forms authentication. This will remove the limitation of the user account as part of Windows or Active directory ASP.Net 2.0 portal web part framework released as part of .Net framework 2.0, helps user build SharePoint portal like web parts in ASP.Net web sites. Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (BSM) released earlier in Oct 2005 helps creating business scorecard. Biz#, expected to be release in 1st Quarter of 2007 is going to strengthen business intelligence by providing out of the box planning, budgeting, forecasting, business analytics and also it leverages “Klondike” in beta, which provides set of adapters to connect to SAP, Siebel, Oracle CRM, MTC-Sols Microsoft business solution based Line of business applications and also helps defining meta data that can be used across these applications. Microsoft has now decided to bundle all the above mentioned products SQL Server 2005, BSM, Biz#, Office 12, ProClarity under one umbrella called as Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007 slated to be released in the mid of 2007. The beta is available from Sept. 2006. Following figure shows the various functional blocks of Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007. Performance Mgt. Applications Scorecarding, Analytics and Planning: PerformancePoint 2007 Portal and Collaboration: SharePoint 2007 End-user Tools End-user analysis: Excel 2007 Integration: SQL 2005 IS BI Platform Analysis: SQL 2005 AS Reporting: SQL 2005 RS Data Warehouse: (SQL 2005 RDBMS) Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007 With all these products and competitive licensing Microsoft is becoming a major BI player. Customers have started leveraging this as part of their enterprise wide BI strategy. 7. Approaching multi-vendor BI platforms As part of BI initiative if customers have invested in multiple BI technologies, customer can continue to leverage their existing investment in other BI technologies. If customer is having Informatica analyzer for data integration, they can continue to use it for there ETL requirements. The Informatica Integration engine can feed the data directly into any Data warehouse including non SQL Server. The SQL 2005 Analysis Services can build cubes on top of any Data warehouse by connecting to the data warehouse database through appropriate data provider. SQL Server 2005 reporting services can connect to Oracle or any other source database through appropriate database driver and can be used for creating reports on non SQL Server database. SQL Server 2005 Data mining algorithms are extensible; third party Data mining algorithms can be integrated to bring in additional functionality. MTC-Sols SharePoint Portal server can host and render reports from Crystal and other reporting tools through appropriate third party web parts. Microsoft BI technology stack is fairly interoperable with other BI vendors and customers can leverage their existing investments by having part of the BI architecture on Microsoft and part of it on non Microsoft technologies. 8. Key Solution offerings For any BI implementation, some or all of these products SQL Server IS, AS, RS, SharePoint v3, Office 12 excel need to be integrated for delivering the BI functionality to the end user. It is not always easy to integrate these products and deliver the BI functionality to end user. Infosys Performance Management Business Intelligence solution helps customers to make best out of there investment in a shorter period of time by providing the proven technology integration, necessary plumbing, prescriptive implementation which can be reused in any Performance management Business Intelligence applications. 1. Defines the End 2 End Methodology for implementing BI solution, as part of methodology provides detailed steps, various checkpoints and artifacts to refer to. 2. Provides Prescriptive Architecture that ensures get it right for the first time. 3. Defines technology guidelines and prescribes implementation Best Practices for SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, Analysis Services, Reporting Services and Share point Portal Server 2003. 4. Infosys solution provides proven start up kits that help to quickly create Reporting, Scorecarding, and Dashboard implementation. 5. Provides viewpoint, guidance, prescriptive implementation on various third-party Reporting components like Dundas. 6. Provides prescriptive implementation for Balanced Scorecard framework. 9. Conclusion While time to respond to changing business is reducing continuously, gigabytes of information is getting created every day. Organizations are facing the problem of managing and digging through this data to make sense and converting it into business benefiting decisions. Infosys Business Intelligence Performance Management solution built from the experience gained through executing several challenging projects provides the approach, building blocks, frameworks for rapid, cost effective, problem resolution mechanism for it’s customers to make their business competitive and fast track, by leveraging Microsoft technology stack. MTC-Sols 10. References• Infosys Implemented Business Intelligence for it’s own operations using SQL Server 2005 http://members.microsoft.com/CustomerEvidence/Search/EvidenceDetails.aspx?EvidenceI D=14157&LanguageID=1 • Microsoft BI case studies http://members.microsoft.com/CustomerEvidence/Search/AdvancedSearchResult s.aspx?AndTaxID=20363 • NASDAQ SQL Server 2005 case study http://members.microsoft.com/CustomerEvidence/Search/EvidenceDetails.aspx ?EvidenceID=13793&LanguageID=1 • Business Scorecard Manager2005 case study http://members.microsoft.com/CustomerEvidence/Search/EvidenceDetails.aspx?EvidenceI D=13652&LanguageID=1 MTC-Sols