Simple Steps Can Unlock Business Insights

by Steve Strauss
Used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

About a year ago, my cousin gave her father a smartphone for his birthday. My uncle smiled indulgently at his tech-savvy daughter and uttered the expected words of gratitude. Weeks later, he quietly confided in me that all he'd really needed was something to make phone calls "instead of doing everything short of diapering a baby." I showed my uncle some of the great things he could do with that phone: surf the Web, do his email, check his calendar, shop online…all tasks that I knew he did regularly on his PC. Oh, he said, I didn't know it could do that stuff. Now he wouldn't part with that smartphone for anything.

It's surprising how many small and midsize businesses are like my uncle, not taking full advantage of the technology they already own. They know they have powerful reporting and analytical tools in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system (especially Excel) – but they aren't sure how to maximize their value. More's the pity, because the tools built into SQL and Excel can provide insights that can help make the difference between profitability and penury.

So, how should a small or midsize business go about unlocking the business intelligence (BI) value inherent in SQL Server and Excel? It all starts with thinking logically about your business and defining your goals. Don't just think about the data you currently collect—think long and hard about what you want to know from your data. What information do you need to drive your business? Are you collecting that data currently? If not, how can you get?
Once you know what you want from your data, it's time to establish your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are the metrics that define success; they let you know how your business is performing. Where do these data reside, and how can they be analyzed to reveal trends, spot opportunities, and reduce inefficiencies?

Let's break the process down into its sequential steps:

1. Think strategically about your business, determining what you need to know from your data to drive your business. Pull your business leaders into this process early on—you need their input in order to create an effective BI strategy.
2. Make a list of all the data you're producing and collecting today, including customer contact information, invoices, account statements and ledgers, website activity, sales numbers, and payroll.
3. Brainstorm with your staff to see if there are other data they would like to track in order to monitor the health of the business. Think about the gaps – what data do you need but don't currently gather? And what current data could be more useful if compiled and reported differently? Add all these data needs to your list.
4. Categorize the data according to type; for instance, customer information, marketing data, inventory counts, financial information, online sales figures, offline sales figures, and so on. Make sure the categories reflect how you think about your business, and that they will be readily meaningful to other people in your company.
5. Make sure you've captured everything. Review the data requirements with all stakeholders to ensure its completeness.
6. Now that you know the data you need to track, work with your business leaders to map it to success metrics. In other words, create your KPIs.
7. Develop a tentative scorecard, which shows all of your KPIs, and review it with your business owners. Modify the scorecard as necessary with their input, to ensure that each business leader can drive his or her part of the operation from the scorecard metrics.

8. Once you've developed a working scorecard – one that gives your business leaders the data they need to monitor their operation and make necessary adjustments – you have a template for creating automated reporting that will deliver value across your company.
9. Set up systems to acquire and automate the data you need but do not currently compile.
10. Build the scorecards and automate the reporting of your KPI data. Now you have the Business Intelligence you need to run your company efficiently and to maximize growth opportunities.

It's imperative that you work with the right technology partner to accomplish the last three steps. Look for partners who are:

1. Certified by major software providers, such as Microsoft Certified Partners, and who have ample experience working with businesses like yours.
2. A well-executed BI solution can save you time and money, help you spot trends, and show you how to grow your customer base. But don't take our word for it. Instead, let's take a look at BI in action, observing how a BI solution turns information into insights that lead to better business decisions.

Raymond James is a financial services company that provides investment and financial planning, investment banking, and asset management, with clients and advisors spread across the United States and Canada. Despite its size, the BI issues confronting Raymond James aren't much different from those that any small or midsize business might encounter. Like so many businesses, Raymond James found itself overwhelmed by data. Its advisors needed real-time insights into which of the company's investment programs were performing well, along with information on the performance of individual client portfolios. It was taking too much time and effort to extract these insights from the mountain of data, largely because the company's software applications were poorly integrated.

"The company has been growing at a rate of up to 20 percent a year, and our applications have been expanding, but not all were integrated," explains Bill Gross, Senior Manager in the Business Intelligence Group at Raymond James. "Our financial advisors spent valuable time jumping between various financial and customer applications to get the kind of insights they need to make informed decisions."

In 2007, Gross created a BI team to fix the problems. This team went through the key steps outlined earlier in this article, and determined that they could build upon their existing Microsoft technology base to improve the availability and usability of their existing BI tools. Consequently, the team opted to migrate to SQL Server 2008 and related technologies, and to use Excel Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide access to real-time, interactive spreadsheets from a web browser. By January, 2009, Raymond James was using SQL Server Integration Services to load transactional data from more than a dozen databases into a single relational data warehouse. Drawing on the power in SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio, the team created dozens of new reports, enabling Raymond James financial advisors to perform rapid BI analysis on more transactions than ever before. This enabled advisors to make better, faster, more cost-effective decisions, which benefit clients and their own bottom line.

Senior managers at Raymond James are able to use the new reporting capabilities to analyze the performance of the business from multiple perspectives. "With today's economy, we have to look closely at which programs are working and which have not performed," Gross says. "Senior management is able to slice and dice metrics however they want them, to better drive their business. They can output the data to Office Excel 2007 and manipulate it without needing to have any technical background."

These experiences aren't unique, and they certainly aren't limited to large, enterprise-class organizations. When small and midsize businesses take the time to delineate their data needs and rationalize their reporting structures, the results can be dramatic improvements in efficiency, growth, and customer satisfaction. And the best part is this: they probably already have the Microsoft tools – the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – that provide the foundation of a robust BI solution. So, work through the BI checklist and then contact a Microsoft Certified Partner, and you'll be on your way to running a smarter, more efficient, more competitive business.

At TeamLogicIT we not only take care of your systems and networks but we take care of your data as well.  Talk to us about a free consultation in Business Intelligence and Analytics.  Our trained experts can help you make sense of your data and get your business pointed in the right direction.  We help your business run smoothly and efficiently with the right metrics.

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