Top 10 BI Benefits
1. Connect people to information. BI makes it easy for decision-makers to get critical information available anytime, anywhere either on desktops or over the Web.
2. Empower your employees. When employees can easily access and understand analytical data they can act in ways that improve productivity and support your overall business strategy.
3. Simplify collaboration and sharing. BI lets you share and manage information in a security-enhanced web environment with a central location to monitor your reports, analyze your data, and share these documents.
4. Analyze and gain insight. Enable employees with access to information using familiar, easy-to-use tools powered by a proven, scalable BI platform. When Information in easy to interact with, people are better able to analyze and evaluate it, resulting in well-informed, insightful decision making.
5. Improve alignment. Articulate strategy, set objectives, monitor performance, perform group analysis, and then make informed decisions that support your overall business strategy. Managers can easily establish lines of responsibility on a strategy map and employees can align their objectives with corporate goals.
6. Harness the power of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Enhancements include increased capacity for interactive analysis in Office Excel 2007 for search, delivery, and collaboration in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and improved visualization technology across the Microsoft Office suites. Business Intelligence is also integrated with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services.
7. Deliver business intelligence to your entire organization. Business Intelligence supports the breadth of your organization's business intelligence needs. Strategic planning is simpler when using familiar tools; information management is easier in a centralized and fully integrated BI environment; and development is more cost-effective when using an industry-standard development environment.
8. Reduce training time and cost. With Business Intelligence, people in your organization can interact with data where they want — in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. By using tools that are familiar, accessible, and widely supported, you lower training costs and significantly shorten the learning curve.
9. Deliver sophisticated analysis and reporting. Rich scorecard functionality, supported by reports, charts, graphs, and analysis, means that employees can readily track key performance indicators (KPIs) against key business goals. Understanding and analyzing the relationships between KPIs and your corporate objectives means you gain a better understanding of how your business is performing today, not at the end of the month, quarter, or year, when it is too late to act and impact performance.
10. Deliver enterprise-grade business intelligence. Business Intelligence delivers power, stability, scalability, enhanced security, and low total cost of ownership (TCO). With the complete and fully integrated platform backed by SQL Server 2005, Business Intelligence delivers extract-transform-load functionality (ETL), online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, predictive analysis, and reporting, all in one.
Related Links Microsoft Business Intelligence Home Page BI Solution Scenarios SQL Server 2005 Features Comparison
