BI Everywhere: Microsoft Is Worth Your Attention

Microsoft’s recent TechEd conference included announcements and discussion of new BI (business intelligence) solutions and features. The common strategy behind these initiatives was an extension of Microsoft’s idea of “BI everywhere” – support for use of reporting, analysis, forecasting, and performance management tools, and access to data-warehouse data supporting these tools, by a much greater percentage of the average business’ employees. This has been a BI goal for the last 25 years, at least; but estimates that 20% of today’s employees use BI require an exceptionally broad definition of the word “use”.

Nevertheless, I believe that Microsoft has an excellent shot at dramatically expanding BI use. The implications for smart, proactive businesses of all sizes and industries are not obvious in TCO or ROI terms; but they make Microsoft’s new offerings vital to consider or implement immediately.

Microsoft’s new offerings center around greater support for services in SQL Server 2008 R2; the ability of Excel users to use BI-type reporting tools on both their own and data-warehouse data, presented in an Excel-type user interface; and the ability to share reports over Microsoft SharePoint. Little or nothing of this goes beyond what IBM/Cognos and Oracle, in particular, have done already. Rather, the significance lies in the Microsoft installed base to which this is being offered.

It is already a truism that Microsoft Office is the almost universal tool of most business employees. In the last few years, Microsoft Sharepoint has been approaching that kind of penetration (by some estimates, approximately 70% of Office users now also use Sharepoint). This predominance represents not only mind share among IT buyers and corporate executives, but also dominance across businesses and industries among individual employees. In other words, Microsoft has the ear not merely of the business market, but of a consumer market looking for solutions that will be of use in their work.

This marks a fundamental difference between Microsoft and all other competitors in the BI market. An SAP/Business Objects or a Microstrategy sells to, designs for, and focuses on BI specialists using a central data warehouse. Even successful attempts by such vendors to design “BI for the masses” are crowded out of much of the business-user market by a work force that tends to learn and use only a few tools for all of their tasks – most of them Microsoft. By contrast, if Microsoft decides to focus on BI that all can use, it has a user interface (Excel), a way of collaborating (SharePoint), and other tools for displaying the results of the work (Word, PowerPoint) that are entirely familiar to most workers. It is far less of a stretch for the average worker to employ these tools for BI than it is to apply, say, Oracle OLAP tools. In Oracle tools, Excel is supported, but Oracle lacks control over look and feel and has a more distant relationship with the ultimate consumer/customer.

This is not to say that Microsoft’s new offerings support a full “BI for the masses” solution. On the contrary, on both the BI and the “masses” end, functionality and integration is missing. Microsoft has only begun to use its services support to implement and encourage BI-type applications available through Excel or integrated with SharePoint. Nor do Microsoft’s OLAP tools yet match Oracle’s and IBM’s in the ability to do fancy analyses. Governance and workflow are often left to IT; predictive analytics are not as feature-rich; and not all BI features available via SQL Server are fully integrated with Excel and Sharepoint.

Therefore, feature-by-feature comparisons and TCO/ROI studies that compare Microsoft to other BI vendors will often show the superiority of the other vendor. When it comes to the many potential BI users who will not use BI through another vendor in the next few years, however, Microsoft isn’t superior: it’s just the only possible game in town.

So my recommendation, to IT, to the CIO, to the CTO, and to the corporate strategist, is to immediately probe the possibility of adding the new features of Office, SharePoint, and SQL Server to all points on the enterprise architecture. An implementation will be perceived as “customer friendly”, and won’t require the massive user education of “technology push”. If there are no obvious targets of opportunity for immediate value-add, well, it is likely that the users will quickly identify some.

However, businesses should clearly understand that this is not usually an investment that is easily justified by specific project profits. Like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint in their time, the key value-add of “BI for the masses” is that it empowers and unlocks the creativity of the individual employee. That value-add will be reflected much more in the day-to-day tasks of the knowledge worker than in the performance management workflow of those parts of the organization that have traditionally used BI. And the benefits will accrue gradually, as universal use begets new BI uses. This is the way the old world of BI may end – not with a bang, but with a long, easy farewell.