Microsoft PerformancePoint: BI or BS?

Inconceivable as it may seem, Microsoft has nearly built from the ground up a BI (business intelligence) application called PerformancePoint Server 2007 (drawing on technologies acquired from Proclarity). Although some will argue that the solution is a “set of BI tools” rather than a performance-monitoring application, PerformancePoint Server has nevertheless garnered positive feedback as a powerful system at a reasonable price.

Now some call this server the Dilbert Server (mocking the pointy-haired boss character who pretends to work but doesn’t); others have called it the Magic-8-Ball Server (because when you put your data in, shake it up and ask if your company will succeed, the response usually is, “Fuzzy, check back later”). So I needed to get a bit more information from an expert on this.

I spoke to Ron Barrett, co-author of his and my latest book on administrating Office servers (including PerformancePoint 2007) and asked for his opinion on the server. Barrett has been a technology professional for 10 years, working at major financial companies in Manhattan, and has hands-on experience with PerformancePoint installation and administration for clients. “What I thought was real cool is that I always imagined that business intelligence tools were for finance people, and that metrics were nothing more than a justification for some high-salaried managers to look busy. But really, I was able to create a simple but effective plan for measuring metrics based on non-financial data; in other words, on things that would matter to an IT person,” Barrett said of the server.

He went on to describe how in his test environment, he was “able to create a useful business model that I could use in my organization, all this with having no more than about a week’s worth of practical experience with the product.”

Barrett also had high praise for the ease of getting the server up and running. “As an IT professional, I have been called on many times to implement applications to make end-users and managers more productive. Of course, this calls for some real mental contortion sometimes,” he said. “But that was not the case for PerformancePoint Server. Both on the server and client side, the setup and configuration were pretty easy to learn. For the first time in a long time I was not deploying an app that had me attached to a phone line with tech support for three days. Or worse, scrubbing the Google search pages until the wee hours, trying to figure out that one error that is stopping everything from running.”

Notably, Barrett acknowledged that he has not worked with any other performance-monitoring solutions prior to testing out PerformancePoint Server 2007. Moreover, he noted that some critics have dinged it because “it lacks some of the advanced analytics they would like to see and it is missing some features available in Excel such as double X-axis graphs.”

However, the fact that it integrates so nicely with Excel allows even non-power users to build reports from their existing Excel knowledge.

The bottom line is, PerformancePoint Server 2007 is a solid effort. The fact that Microsoft took a near-ground-up approach really calls for people’s attention: The company clearly plans to make a splash in the BI market.

My readers tend to always have another opinion, so let’s hear it: Are you using PerformancePoint? Do you love it? Hate it? Have another suggestion? We want to know.

On a side topic, I want to ensure that all readers interested in attending the Microsoft Dynamics CRM have the opportunity to sign up. So, visit Microsoft’s site to see event locations and enroll.