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 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.
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:
Many SharePoint projects are put in peril because up-front analysis on getting adoption, stakeholder buy in, and implementation is not properly analyzed. This section provides some guidance on important things to consider. Many times this effort is driven by technical folks without a lot of exposure to the ins and outs of management and budget topics.
Who your primary or first customer will be is critically important to how you will approach this task. Your customers may be internal, external, or even partners. This will drive your focus. Perhaps you need better access to reports, more intuitive data drive analysis, or even just to be able to present the data to them that they have to get themselves right now.
Talk to your customers and see what their priorities are. Don't assume you know because this can result in mixed communication and less than ideal results. Find out what they feel are shortcomings in the current system, and where they would like to see it improved. They will likely mention things like seeing more information aligned together, being able to quickly drill down, or being able to get that data into and out of Excel or a database easily. These are some of the most common requests of data consumers who are feeling challenged in their current environment. As you know from this text, these are all things SharePoint does quite well.
Keep in mind your data may be spread over the enterprise in multiple systems. See Figure 29-1 for some examples. This may require some ETL to centralize it for the type of analysis you want to do, but in many cases this is not necessary. You'll notice this task is placed after talking to the customers. Many organizations do these in reverse. You don't need to spend time mapping all your data until you know what you need to go get and align. Your data quality will be very important as well. Make sure to check this and get feedback on it from your customers, because poor data quality will seriously impact your ability to design a useful BI solution in SharePoint. The most common data sources for SharePoint BI are:
Like many organizations you likely have many if not all of these in your environment. Make sure you evaluate the limitations and benefits that each data source will bring. Some, like PowerPivot, will require additional configuration in your SharePoint environment to support their new functionality. Don't shy away from this thought because the configuration is straightforward and well documented (and included in this text for basic implementations).
Not every organization is going to go out and purchase a large amount of server hardware to get this initiative going, and you don't need to. Make sure you know what your budget is and what you have to work with. Once you have this information, begin focusing on a prototype (more on this later). Make sure when you are building your prototype that you focus not only on the development pieces, but also on the infrastructure impact. This information will be important to management to help them plan for future expansion and budgetary needs.
Many organizations do annual budgeting for capital expenses, so you will want to get an environment where you get some prototypes working and get the business excited, and then use that as your use case to get additional resources allocated in the budget based on business need. Your use case is typically a business need that is supplied with a proposal to management to help them see why this new prototype is needed. Many times the support of the business driven from those prototypes can provide a needed boost when budget time comes around.
Maybe you're in an executive pressure cooker situation where they need something for a board meeting, or your boss needs something for an annual management retreat to show off to his/her peers. This will necessitate a faster prototyping and delivery approach. It would be better to attempt to prototype and deliver on existing hardware potentially than to wait for an order of a new server. There is a full set of instructions on MSDN to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 for development only if you want to install and run it on a beefy desktop or laptop. You can find those instructions here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx.
Otherwise you may want to procure a server that meets a longer term requirement and allows for multiple prototypes and potential production deployments. You will also want to make sure you gather the information in the next section quickly and get it over to your administrators to configure security, accounts, and so on. Many organizations have a change window, so make sure you're familiar with these procedures to allow yourself enough time to get what you need implemented.
Technology has always been an interaction between people and systems. This section discusses the systems you will need to plan for when building out your new environment and the people you will need to partner with.
Many security requirements exist when implementing SharePoint BI. The required ones were addressed in other lessons in the book, but some of the important things to consider for information gathering are:
Some of this will require you to help plan with your administrators who and what systems will need to talk to each other. Make sure to take time and plan this correctly because you will not be able to proceed in some phases of installation and configuration without the appropriate security in place.
Requirements are a critical phase of any project. The number one complaint the author team hears in the field from technical personnel is “they didn't give us any requirements and then said it was wrong.” We are not taking sides because we've been on both sides of that debate, but if you are asked to paint a house and someone will not tell you a color, you will likely not do it or paint a small area and then say “do you like this?” “Lighter or darker?” and so on. If you cannot get clear requirements, take a look at anything existing and create a portion of a mockup. Most customers will appreciate the initiative and be eager to give feedback. If you've never thought through a requirements process before, Figure 29-2 will give you some pointers on where to focus.
Now you're on your way to a good set of requirements. Then go ahead and write them yourself so you can give them to the next set of customers and say “This was what Suzie in finance was looking for, maybe this can be a good starting point for you.” Often with new technology, you will need to help lead the business until they understand some of the capabilities.
A successful BI effort will rely heavily on the investment and adoption by stakeholders. These could be anyone in the organization with the drive and budgetary power to help you succeed in getting resources to begin building your solutions. These folks are important in helping you navigate the following obstacles that are common in many projects, especially Business Intelligence and SharePoint projects:
Your stakeholders can be anyone in your management chain or a parallel chain such as a business unit. Make sure, however, that your management team is supportive of exploring this topic before you go off and try lining up stakeholders. The most important stakeholders will be your personal management team because they are effectively vouching for you and your ability to make this happen. Make your stakeholders the priority.
Does your firm host its own servers, or does it source this to a provider? This will play a large part in the speed and availability of hardware and infrastructure configuration. The best approach here assumes that you're not the person who handles these items day-to-day. It will help get the ball rolling if you proceed with a few scenarios for the folks who manage that area. For example:
This will enable each area to scale individually based on the growth rate and level of adoption from the division or enterprise.
Make sure to compile a list of integrated systems that will be working with the SharePoint environment. This may include:
In this Try It you create a spreadsheet with headers and items that are important for discussions with stakeholders.
This lesson assumes you're familiar with the concepts of Excel and have some experience using it as a planning tool. In this lesson you will make a list of systems and people that you will need to work with to ensure a successful deployment of your prototype.
Please select Lesson 29 on the DVD to view the video that accompanies this lesson.