By Michael K. Campbell
As someone who spends a lot of my time interacting with SQL Server, I’ve started to take an interest in PerformancePoint Server 2007. Designed to help organizations take Business Intelligence to the "next level", PerformancePoint Server provides a powerful range of easy-to-use tools that let companies take advantage of existing skills, infrastructure, and solutions in order to implement Business Performance Mangement, or BPM. With my background in SQL Server, I "get" much of the underlying technology, but I’ve been wrestling a fair degree with the need for the technology. I was therefore happy to bump into a webcast showing how to use PerformancePoint Server in day-to-day strategic planning and reporting: Strategic Planning and Scorecarding with PerformancePoint Server 2007.
If you’re new to PerformancePoint Server, or Business Performance Management in general, this webcast starts off with an overview of BPM and a high-level introduction to PerformancePoint Server 2007.
It also provides an overview of previous webcasts in this series in order to give you an idea of other aspects of PerformancePoint Server that you can learn about as well.
If you’re somewhat familiar with BPM or PerformancePoint Server, you’ll be able to jump into this webcast pretty easily without having to watch the previous webcasts first.
What I really enjoyed about this webcast was being able to see strategic planning in action. As a SQL consultant (and former DBA / SQL Developer) I really don’t have much of an appreciation for what analysts and business users will typically do with something like PerformancePoint Server.
But, after a great refresher course in BPM and PerformancePoint Server during the first few minutes of this webcast, it quickly turned to the main focus: a detailed, hands-on, series of demos. The first demo (which took up the bulk of the webcast) was an end-to-end scenario that showcased how to use the Business Modeler:
But more than just clicking on design surfaces and turning levers and knobs, this webcast finally helped me understand why there’s so much focus in PerformancePoint Server on allowing typical-end users to supply data. Being of a typical ‘BI’ mind-set, I’ve found myself a bit muddled by that in the past. (After all, doesn’t data for analysis and scorecarding come from the database, and from cubes? Wasn’t that the purpose of creating data marts/warehouses and populating them with data from the entire enterprise?)
By showcasing a number of "day-in-the-life" scenarios where typical information workers or business end-users connected to PerformancePoint Server business models via Excel, in the form of assignments, I was able to finally "get" that unlike BI, BPM really is heavily focused on top-down planning. Yeah, I know the literature says that over and over, but I never really got that until seeing it in action with this webcast.
In other words, it’s not about an analysis of data "after the fact". Business Performance Management’s purpose is really to plan, forecast, or budget for real-life business trends, and then see how those anticipations work out in reality. This, of course, is the whole purpose of scorecarding – to keep tabs on how well budgets, forecasts, and expectations measure up against tangible, measurable, performance that’s typically (but not necessarily) aggregated by data-marts, cubes, and so forth. But for me, that didn’t really "click" until this webcast that covered KPIs and strategic plans from a business perspective, as well as from a tooling perspective.
TIP: When engaged in strategic planning, you should only use a limited number of priorities or KPIs. The webcast does a great job of explaining why, but the primary reason is that if you're planning too many priorities, then you're not doing a good job of planning a strategy.
With that background in place, the webcast then went on to show how analysts or designers can create associations, entities, and full-blown business models. It then proceeded to showcase how to create reports, and strategic maps – which are much cooler (and easier to create) than I would have initially thought.
From there it was a quick jaunt over to creating actual dashboards and showing how they could be used by typical end-users for easy analysis of how business is performing according to an overall business plan.
What I really liked though was finally seeing some of these dashboard "widgets" and "gears" translated into contextually beneficial instrumentation. I’ve read a good deal on PerformancePoint Server and BPM up to this point in my quest to try and understand it, but one of the things that’s always been has been some background on why examples and tutorials always assume that you’d want to build indicators and KPIs in the way that examples and tutorials always seem to do. In other words, it wasn’t until I watched someone create a full-blown sample environment while talking about simple things like budgets, market analysis, trends, and other things that I began to really "get" what makes PerformancePoint Server so great.
The primary demo also took a bit of a view into how well-crafted reports could provide end-users with not only the ability to slice and dice data on the fly, but to address business "corrections" in relative real-time as well.
In fact, what’s so cool about PerformancePoint Server is that updating the data model to address strategic decisions will actually end up being easier for most executives than actually making the "real" business changes that correspond to data model changes. That’s something I don’t think I ever would have figured out without having watched this webcast.
Amazingly, though, this webcast had more to offer. Once the "end-to-end" sample was done, the webcast switched to another demo showing a more polished, and fully-implemented environment. This is typically what I’ve encountered in other samples and demos, and don’t find them to be too beneficial as they assume that you know a lot about what was created in the first place. But contrasted with the information provided in the previous portion of this webcast, this section of the demo really helped show off just what can be possible with PerformancePoint Server – including things like mapping strategic maps right on top of geographical maps that can then be bound to dashboards:
Happily, this webcast answered some long-standing, and lingering, questions that I’ve had about how PerformancePoint Server really works. Better yet, it answered those questions really well by showing me how strategic planning and reporting on that planning is supposed to work on a day-to-day basis. I plan on watching the other webcasts in this series over the next few weeks. But if you’re interested in seeing how PerformancePoint Server works from a BUSINESS standpoint, then I can highly recommend this webcast and encourage you to go take a look at Strategic Planning and Scorecarding with Performance Point Server 2007.