SharePoint® 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer

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Planning Your SharePoint Business Intelligence Project

Now that you have worked with the clay that makes up the SharePoint BI offerings, it's time to plan for an initiative in your environment. This initiative will be focused on getting a prototype SharePoint solution up-and-running for your organization. This lesson covers the major focus areas for that effort. They include priority drivers, necessary information, and planning processes that have been successful in the authors' experience.

PRIORITY DRIVERS

Priority drivers are the things that are pushing your organization towards the types of solutions SharePoint 2010 can provide. Perhaps it's too many reports, or too few with problems accessing the data. There are a number of factors that could be driving this new initiative. This section discusses those.

Why Are You Doing This?

One of the first things you need is to identify the organizational drivers behind this new effort. Some major drivers for a SharePoint initiative include:

• Executive request — Did your boss go to a conference and come home and demand SharePoint? This is happening more and more as Microsoft continues to show its leadership in this technology. Nothing's perfect, but SharePoint is by far the most mature and extensible collaboration and enterprise management platform on the market.
• Problems aligning data in your enterprise — Many organizations have a wealth of data that data services, reporting, and BI teams struggle to align because they come from very ...