Quilogy Business Intelligence Blog

Business Scorecard Manager, Reporting Services, or Both

Something that has come up quite a bit lately is the ability to get a scorecard to many people in the organization, but without the CALs that BSM may require.  Its a pretty easy distinction - but with a cost: your ability to truly measure and manage performance is impacted based on the choice.

• If you need a dashboard and the ability to get great detail and analysis in relation to a scorecard, then the BSM CALs are perfect for you, and the rest of the organization.  This dashboard will provide you with not only business intellegence, but hopefully business knowledge that you can use to effectively manage performance each and every day.  You can see the 'red light', click on it, and get the related contextual information presented to you in a cool SharePoint interface.
  
• If all you need is to produce a scorecard for people in the organization to consume, without the dashboard and ability to drill from the scorecard, etc., then deploy the scorecard from the scorecard builder to a Reporting Services report.  The report will show the scorecard, but not have the click and change aspects the dashboard provides in the scorecard and report view.  Therefore, the consumer of the information will simply have a static view, with few analysis options.

Consider this - why not do both?  Try starting out with the CALs in BSM on a subset of the organization - pick a department - and see how it dramatically changes how that department works.  In the meantime, create a simple static scorecard by deploying the scorecard to Reporting Services - and watch how they use the tool.  In the end, you may have the proof you need to justify the CALs.

--Dean Furness
dfurness@quilogy.com