New MS BI Burger - Delivering BI to everyone in the organization

After Microsoft announced that Office PPS 2007 would be folded into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise 14 - which was officially death of PerfomancePoint Server - there's been slight changes on the famous "Microsoft BI Burger".

The new burger was designed to deliver Business Intelligence to the masses via SharePoint based under idea of "Delivering BI to everyone in the organization".

Farewell PPS!

"There will be no future version of PerformancePoint Server."

Microsoft will consolidate PerformancePoint Server (PPS) with its scorecards, dashboards, and analytic capabilities into SharePoint as "PerformancePoint Services" with the release of SharePoint 14 in late 2009.

http://blogs.msdn.com/bi/archive/2009/01/23/microsoft-bi-strategy-update.aspx

Not a good news at all for MS BI world! I'm not surprised about "Planning" module as I believe it was NOT successful, but embedding "Monitoring & Analytics" into SharePoint, mmmmmmm?!

Other links:

http://performancepointinsider.com/blogs/bsm/archive/2009/01/22/just-call-me-performancepoint-services.aspx

http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2009/01/rip-performancepoint-server.html

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2009

Gartner is an information technology research and advisory firm which provides research analysis and advice for IT professionals, technology companies and the investment community.

The "Magic Quadrant for BI" by Gartner, presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to develop business intelligence (BI) applications.

See the full article here: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/sas/vol5/article8/article8.html

Tips for gathering "Business Requirements" in a BI project.

In my opinion the most important and challenging aspect of a BI project is to understand the business requirements. Majority of BI projects failures are due to lack of understanding the business. This lack is primarily due to BI being thought as an IT project, instead of being a business project with IT as one of the enablers.

It's very important to find out "what they need" and not just focus on "what they want". The most effective way of doing that is by "face to face" meetings with managers, business users and IT people. The goal of a requirements interview is to ask questions in order to discover unknown frontiers. Think of it as a one-hour immersion to better understand what business people do and why. How do they make decisions today, and how do they want to be making decisions in the future? First ask interviewees about their roles and responsibilities to get them engaged and from there, cover the following areas:

• What are the key business objectives?
• For each objective, ask about measures for success to learn more about key metrics and business dimensions.
• What roles do data and analysis play in achieving goals? Alternatively, how would better access and analysis benefit them?
• What are the current analysis challenges?

A good question to get the interview started is "How can people tell when you're doing a great job?"

Be conversational: For the DW/BI practitioner, being conversational means putting yourself into a business frame of mind. Learn the language of the business. Don't intimidate end users by asking "What do you want in a data warehouse?" End users aren't systems designers. Acronyms and IT vernacular don't belong in a business requirements interview.

Several techniques can help you establish a more conversational tone:

• Learn a bit about the business beforehand by reviewing the Web site or annual report to understand company-specific vocabulary and hot-button issues.
• Meet with interviewees on their own turf. Go to their offices or conference rooms, rather than IT meeting spaces.
• Prior to the interview, send out an announcement describing the high-level discussion topics and confirming the interview time and place. Don't attach a detailed questionnaire to this meeting notice. You can't achieve a conversational flow if you're reviewing questionnaire results-presuming anyone bothers to complete the survey.
• Interview questions prepared in advance are fallback devices, used only if uncomfortable lulls occur in conversations or to ensure key points are covered before ending sessions.
• Most good conversations tend to wander, so remember your session goals and steer conversations back on track if you stray too far from core issues.
• Stay at a relatively high level in the interview's early stages. Don't follow an early comment to a very low level of detail, only to run out of time and discover that you haven't discussed three other major areas of responsibility with important requirements for the DW/BI effort.

Listen, and expect to be changed: Good interviewers should be seen but not heard — well, at least not heard too much. Strong active listening skills are required.

As you're gathering requirements from the business users, intersperse some data reality into the process by interviewing key IT personnel, especially the master database administrators responsible for operational systems. Consider what the business needs are in tandem with the availability of data to support these requirements. IT meetings tend to be informal discussions, beginning with knowledgeable project team members. Once you start to hear consistent themes from users, it's time to sit down with the data gurus and get into the extreme detail of their source systems. During these data audit interviews, try to understand whether complete, reliable data is there to support what users are asking for.

There are several methods and resources for BIR, one of the best is "The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit by R. Kimball, ...".

MCTS & MCITP Certifications for SQL Server 2008 BI

Last week I got the results of those beta exams (71-448, 71-452) and surprisingly, I passed both!

The surprise was because I passed them though I hadn't had a chance to work with SQL Server 2008 in a real project before, and that means there is something wrong with the exams that you can pass them based on your SQL Server 2005 experience and just reading about new features of the 2008 version.

But the good thing is that I've passed them and there is nothing to worry about till the next version! The next version of SQL Server code-named "Killimanjaro", will be released in the first half of 2010, according to Microsoft officials. The first tech preview test builds of Kilimanjaro are due in the first half of 2009. It will provide the foundation for Microsoft's first data warehouse appliance, code-named Madison, and a BI tool called Gemini that's being designed to bring a broader range of employees into the BI fold.

A feedback on 71-452 (70-452) exam: Designing a Business Intelligence Infrastructure Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008

I sat on that beta exam yesterday and here are some points:

• There are 75 questions and the time is 3 hours which is a bit tight
• Unlike 70-446, there is no case scenario and all questions are standalone (not related to each other)
• Many data mining questions. Mostly about choosing the best algorithm.
• A few around upgrading and migration strategy
• Many questions about new features in SQL 2008, like CDC, MERGE, …
• From the name of exam, I expected to see more “Design” related questions, but there were many development questions which I think they could be moved to the TS exam (70-448)

As usual I recommend you to have a look at the topics here and work on those that you are not familiar with.

I must wait for few weeks to get the result. Fingers crossed!

An excellent quote

"The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. "
- Daniel Webster"

2008 CIO Technology Priorities

According to a survey by Gartner "Business Intelligence Applications" is the highest priority for CIOs. Here is the top 10 result:

SQL Server 2008 RTM

Download SQL Server 2008 Enterprise 180-day evaluation from here:

• Trial Experience for Developers
• Trial Experience for IT Professionals

SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack (August 2008). It contains 17 new redistributable and backward compatibility components and add-on providers. Download it from here:

• SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack - Aug 2008

Have you ever wondered what the last meeting before a product ships is like? Have a look at inside the SQL 2008 ship room!.

A feedback on beta exam 71-448 (70-448)

I'm just coming back from MS beta exam 71-448 (TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance). There were too many questions (70!) and the time was around 3 hours which was more than enough.

It was a bit disappointing that not many questions were specifically related to SQL Server 2008 new features -not even 5 questions were specific to that!- so if you don't know much about the new features, don't worry!

SSAS: · many admin tasks · a few MDX · dimension settings · attribute properties · performance monitoring and tuning · using profiler for monitoring user roles · cube processing options · deployment options · setting permission

SSRS: · security · backup the SSRS database · setting parameters · assembly file · custom control · failover environment

SSIS: · a few questions around SSIS package configuration · transaction · a couple of Foreach loop (file)

Data Mining: · a few DMX questions

In total it was not tough if you have passed the 70-445 (SQL 2005) exam, you just need to review the topics from Microsoft website and play around the topics that you haven’t had chance to work on them.

Good luck!