Q. What is Business Intelligence and what does it do?

Business Intelligence, a complete suite of server, client, and developer applications fully integrated with the 2007 Microsoft Office system, delivers business intelligence on the desktop in an integrated, centrally managed environment.

Business Intelligence simplifies information discovery and analysis, making it possible for decision-makers at all levels of an organization to more easily access, understand, analyze, collaborate, and act on information, anytime and anywhere. Move from just consuming information to developing deep contextual knowledge about that information. By tying strategy to metrics, organizations can gain competitive advantage by making better decisions faster, at all levels of the organization.

Business Intelligence delivers business intelligence to everyone in an organization by integrating two major components:

* The Business Intelligence platform, driven by Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and including its powerful relational database management system, SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, and SQL Server Data Mining capabilities. Business Intelligence is built on the scalable and reliable SQL Server 2005 platform, proven to support mission-critical environments, and integrated with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development platform.

The 2007 Microsoft Office system, delivering information through the tools that users already know and rely on. Users can share more powerful, interactive spreadsheets using improved charting and formula authoring, greater row and column capacity, and enhanced sorting and filtering along with enhanced PivotTable and PivotChart views. With server-based spreadsheets, you can share information broadly with confidence, knowing that your information is more secure and centrally managed, yet accessible to colleagues, customers, and partners through the Web. Dynamic scorecards combine the power of predictive analysis with real-time reporting. Strategy maps make it easy to visualize key areas — you can see trends, identify problem areas early, maximize success areas, and monitor performance against key goals in real time.

Q. Who is Business Intelligence for?

Business Intelligence is for businesses that want to drive intelligent decision-making throughout their organizations and make it easy for everyone in the organization to collaborate, analyze, share, and act on business information from a centrally managed, more secure source. Enterprise grade yet attractively priced, Business Intelligence supports IT professionals, information workers, and developers, and empowers organizations of all sizes.

Q. What if I have a small (fewer than 100-person) company? Can I still use Business Intelligence?

Yes. Business Intelligence provides an excellent business intelligence solution for organizations of all sizes. You can deploy reporting solutions to a small workgroup or department with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. You can also perform queries and analysis using Excel Services — new to the 2007 release of Microsoft Office — through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This combination delivers Web-based query and analysis capabilities to every user in a format that is easy to use and centrally secured and managed.

Q. What’s a typical way an organization might use Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence connects the right people to the right information at the right time. For example, when reviewing the current financial scorecard, your sales manager, Margaret, notices that one particular region is not contributing as much as other regions. When analyzing the data from the spreadsheet for the low-performing region, she notices that one particular salesperson, Joe, has below-average sales numbers.

At the same time, Joe receives through e-mail a weekly status report that contains qualified leads in the region, pipeline information, and details about deals closed. Next, he opens the dashboard and searches on information about his top account, and he sees data from his enterprise resource planning (ERP) system related to that account. Joe notes that his average deal size is smaller than others in the region. It’s easy for Joe to find out why this is by doing some "what if" analysis. He inputs different variables to determine the number of leads he needs to reach the company sales average. Next, by doing further analysis on data for the region, Joe can compare his sales numbers with regional averages. He adds more information that shows the discount rate, and then adds visualization to better understand the results. The visual representation of the data shows Joe that his discount rate is much lower than the average for the region.

Next, it’s time to tell his manager. Joe publishes this information to the server, schedules a meeting with Margaret to discuss getting approval to increase the discount rate so that he’ll be better able to compete, and alerts Margaret through online collaboration that he’s just posted his analysis report.

Joe and Margaret meet to discuss details. Afterward, he makes a note on the key performance indicator (KPI) that he owns for that region, and Margaret sees the annotation in her latest scorecard as a reminder that there’s a new strategy in place to increase Joe’s results and address the poor sales performance.

What programs are included in Business Intelligence? Is Business Intelligence available as a single product in a box?

Business Intelligence includes two major components: the business intelligence platform (SQL Server 2005) and end-user tools — the 2007 Microsoft Office system.