SharePoint and BI : Better Together !!

I feel very motivated by the resposne to this morning's webinar that we did on the BI Capabilities of SharePoint. My intuition is starting to turn into a belief that data analysis and  management is going to gain significant momentum for two key reasons:

    1. Management Pressure: Upper and mid management will continue to be under pressure to show value by cutting cost and increasing efficiency. This in turn will put pressure on IT to evolve their BI strategy to include Self Service BI so as not to get bogged down by increase in demand. Self-service BI will be thier saviour as they will not be able to scale up by hiring more people because of continued cost pressure.

   2. To make sense out of the information explosion: Collaboration features in tools like SharePoint are resulting in an unprecedented level of information explosion. Organizations will be hard pressed to make sense out of all that informantion for multiple reasons, including;
                a. Legal Liability
                b. Getting Pulse of Employees Sentiments
                c. Knowledge Sharing
                d. Data Quality and Accuracy
                e. Many more.

  I believe, SharePoint is uniquely placed to capitalize on this opportunity. I cannot think of a better delivery engine for all this data analysis and mining capablities. I also cannot wait for Denali and Crescent to coem to market with thenext level of coolness.

Here are few slides that I came up with for today's event that maps various Self-Service state that organizations can choose to be in (depending upon their unique requirements), and components from Microsoft BI stack that can enable those requirements.  I have included only the delivery components in the stack, and therefore SSIS, SSAS and other underlying components are missing.
 
** If you need non-watermarked version of these images for non malicious purposes, just drop me a note and I will be glad to send a copy.

The BI Continuum

Capabilities Mapped to target BI Strategy options

Technology Enablers Mapped to Target BI States 

 ** If you need non-watermarked version of these images for non malicious purposes, just drop me a note and I will be glad to send a copy.

   I am tempted to add the coud-Azure dimension to the Microsoft BI story, but that's probably in another post.
Cheers!!