Quilogy Business Intelligence Blog

BSM is a verb... Exposing Easy to Find Data

While continuing to communicate with many customers, we are finding increasingly many data sources to place behind BSM.  For instance - if you have MSCRM 3.0, using it as a data source can provide a very nice scorecard showing customer interaction, profiles, leads, opportunities, and customer service instances.  Furthermore, adding it to your CRM interface as a 'menu option' allows you to seamlessly move around and get the overall view you are looking for while continuing to work on daily relationship management.

Consider this as well - using Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) as a backend data store for BSM.  MOM typically tosses data into a reporting database and provides the ability to look at statistics of various servers in your organization - SQL, Exchange, etc.  If you capture the appropriate statistics, you might as well create a cube, build out a scorecard and get VALUE from all of that data collection.

Project Server?  Yep - it can push data to cubes.  BSM that too!  (Can we make 'BSM' into a verb?)

BizTalk - consider using BizTalk 2006's BAM features, pushing them into a cube, and even using SQL 2005 real-time caching to provide a dashboard with BSM giving very up to date statistics on data flowing through the BizTalk engine.

Shall I go on?  Ok, I won't.  But the point is this...  You have data.  Its everywhere.  Some of it is structured, some is not.  In general, much of it can come from many of the vendor-based applications you already have installed.  Take a look - you might find some seriously cool dashboarding options right in front of you...

'BSM' it!

--Dean
dfurness@quilogy.com