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Do you hate SharePoint? Part 4 of 4

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If the answer is yes, could your hatred be caused by your local implementation? In this final post of our blog series we look at the last of four common problems with SharePoint implementations and how you can address them.

Once again, a huge thank you to Neil MacIsaac, SharePoint MCT, for putting this entire series together. Happy reading!

If you missed the earlier posts you can find them here

  1. Information Management
  2. Project Management
  3. Information Security
  4. Business Intelligence

This week we look at Business Intelligence.

4. Business Intelligence

Are there organizations out there that are really striving for Business Unintelligence? Wouldn't everything that an organization does be in an effort to do something better? I love the term Business Intelligence (BI) mainly because of its massive overuse and its wide misunderstanding as 'reporting'. So the question really becomes "How do we maximize our BI?" First, it is important to understand what BI really is. It is about making better decisions. If we have better data, and a better understanding of our data, it would be logical to conclude we would make better decisions right? Not necessarily. The theory is correct, but in practice most organizations fail to implement this properly by not focusing on the decision that they are trying to improve and instead only achieve in bombarding their key decision makers with an avalanche of reports. What is also surprising is that most of the decision makers in an organization are probably the ones asking for the reports in the first place. Let me give you an example. In a sales based business, you might see some monthly sales figures like this (overly simplified for the sake of discussion)

Sales Member

Monthly Sales (Units)

John

5,437

Mary

8,350

Bob

3,043

Jim

7,410

Why do we need to see these sales figures? The typical answer you will get will be "Because I need to know if there are any problems and to see if we are doing better or worse than last month or last year." So, with the above numbers, where is the problem? Most people would focus on Bob because his numbers are lower than the others. What isn't shown with these numbers is that Bob is the newest of team and manages the smallest sales area. Can you still spot where the problem is in the above sales numbers? The typical failure in implementing a BI solution within SharePoint is usually in the disregard for a proper BI solution that focuses on those key decisions which strives to achieve a better decision by supplying as much data around the factors and drivers of the data as the data itself. Instead we see fancier reports of the above sales table and hope that our decision makers will 'figure it out'. Another interesting point concerning SharePoint and BI integration is the potential for SharePoint to implement the decision. If our BI solution is focused on key decisions, a good solution should allow the user to implement the decision as quickly and easily as possible.

Conclusion

As you can see, SharePoint offers many challenges when deployed into an organization and requires due diligence to maximize your return. I hope that some of my tips may make their way into your organization and perhaps save you from some of the common pitfalls that have trapped others. There is good reason why SharePoint has become as popular as it has and hopefully you will be better able to get the most out of your implementation.