Welcome to the Business Intelligence Garden Party
“You see, ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself” – Ricky Nelson, Garden Party
When Ricky Nelson sang about the Garden Party in the early seventies, he probably wasn’t talking about business intelligence (BI), but his pithy chorus does apply. In today’s fast-paced environment, your IT Department simply doesn’t have the time and resources to “please everyone’s” need for timely business intelligence, so “ya got to please yourself”.
What this means is having access to robust, visual, self-service business intelligence tools that facilitate getting the right information, to the right people, at the right time. A recent Aberdeen Group study titled “Picture This: Self-Service BI through Data Discovery and Visualization” (free membership required) found that both business users and corporate IT win when users can use these kinds of tools to better address unanticipated information needs in a timely way.
The study also found that as a result of deploying visual, self-service business intelligence tools, significantly less IT staff may be needed to support the community of business intelligence users. In fact, organizations deploying these self-service visual tools can manage 65% more BI users with every supporting member of the IT staff.
The business intelligence tools available in the Microsoft Dynamics® GP family of products enable users to not only visualize important business information for critical decision making, but to do so with minimal or no help from IT staff. These tools include:
- Excel Reports – refreshable spreadsheets connected directly to transactional and master data
- Web-based SQL reports, charts, graphs and KPI’s
- Visual Dashboards based on Microsoft SharePoint technology
There are also a number of third-party visual, self-service, business intelligence tools that can easily access the Microsoft Dynamics information. One of the leading applications in this area is Tableau Desktop, from Tableau Software. This tool can easily be used by end users to visualize information in a variety of ways.
Please contact The Resource Group for further information on the Microsoft Dynamics family of products and all of the associated, visual, self-service business intelligence tools.
By The Resource Group – Washington Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner
*This post is locked for comments