SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

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Business Intelligence Services

By Reza Alirezaei

If you have ever done a Business Intelligence (BI) project before, chances are that at some point in your career, you have turned a paper-based report into a digitized format. Regardless of the technology you used to deliver your first project, the joy of eliminating an inefficient manual process stayed with you for a long time, if not forever. Well, that's what this chapter is all about!

This chapter is about how to design solutions that help organizations to harness and distribute information in a more intelligent way. It also covers key BI capabilities provided with SharePoint 2010 that help you design such solutions.

UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

For a long time, a big hurdle in IT was the fact that looking at historical or real-time data and making sense of it was just something restricted to a special group of people with specific talents and knowledge of specialized tools.

It's crystal clear that part the problem lies in the tools, hardware, and methodologies used to work with information. Regardless of the root cause, with all the advancements in the IT industry, this has caused a good deal of trouble for organizations, such as inaccurate statistics and bad decisions being made (which sometimes come with additional costs and lifelong consequences).

Ask any executive why he or she needs BI and the answer will most likely always boil down to one sentence: “Because I need to make better operational and tactical decisions ...