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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 disparate systems and processes. Microsoft BI provides a tremendous platform to help accomplish this, but even without centralized warehouse capabilities, PerformancePoint and SharePoint BI allow you to begin to tie data together in ways you didn't know you could.
• Trying to stay ahead of the technology curve — Many organizations have time and budget set aside to make sure that they are not caught by surprise when the next major technology shift happens. With the advent of SharePoint, Office Online, and many Microsoft core products becoming deeply integrated with SharePoint, more companies are putting this effort into understanding and applying SharePoint in their environment.
• Need an environment to train the team for internal development — It's great that you're reading this book, but unless it's a team reading assignment (and it should be), your peers or team will need some hands on time with the tools. This will require some type of base environment. This could be virtual servers as long as you pay attention to the system requirements.
• The authors recommend a minimum of 4 cores and 8GB of RAM from a performance perspective. Storage will be dependent on your application, but ensure you're meeting minimum requirements because they have been increased for this version of SharePoint. Also remember that you need 64-bit operating systems for this version to work.

End Users Are Important

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.

Getting Stakeholder Buy In

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.

Where Is Your Data?

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:

• SQL Server databases
• Analysis Services databases
• SharePoint Lists
• PowerPivot workbooks
• ODATA Streams (through PowerPivot workbooks)
• OLE DB Compatible Data Sources

FIGURE 29-1

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).

What Is Your Budget?

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.

When Do You Need It Online?

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.

Systems and People

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.

Security

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:

• Who will need access to the data?
• Should there be a data access proxy account? (Most likely)
• What service applications will the organization be running?
• What external data sources will be required?
• Will you be transporting data and need to access other systems or partner systems?
• Have you identified which SharePoint Farm accounts will be needed to run the farm?
• Do you know who the developers and administrators are who will need access?
• Do you understand your organization's security policies and how to request these items?

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

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.

FIGURE 29-2

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.

Stakeholders

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:

• Helping the business understand the value
• Gathering information to help you deliver value early in the process
• Promoting the project before it begins to build buzz
• Lining up viewers for demos and other internal marketing events to promote the effort
• Planning the budgetary impact with you to help ensure you can deliver value for an introductory cost factor

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.

Hosting and Infrastructure

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:

• Introductory needs — This is a package of servers and licenses for development only that meet or slightly exceed the minimum requirements, but are only for prototyping. This provides a very cost-effective way to get into the technology and show it off without breaking the bank.
• Departmental implementation — This is a package that will ensure that a department can get rolled out and provides some growth allowance. This may include some scaling out of web front-end servers, but perhaps still consolidating the content database servers with the application servers. This will provide some additional capacity while still allowing you to keep the application and data together to help save on the largest servers in the group.
• Divisional rollout — This is the point where your organization will begin scaling out all levels of the infrastructure. This would typically include all or some combination of:
  • Multiple web front-end servers
  • Dedicated application servers
  • Search and index/crawl servers
  • SQL Server to host content and metadata databases

  This will enable each area to scale individually based on the growth rate and level of adoption from the division or enterprise.

Integrated Systems

Make sure to compile a list of integrated systems that will be working with the SharePoint environment. This may include:

• Corporate or partner e-mail systems — E-mail is critical to any enterprise and SharePoint has lots of capabilities around e-mail. Submitting documents to SharePoint libraries, automating workflows and approvals, and other great functionality should be explored for implementation.
• Enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, etc.) — Many organizations have centralized data sources for much of their important customer or marketing data. These could be a CRM, ERP, or other manufacturing or sales management systems. SharePoint can work with many of these data sources through BCS, so make sure you know what type of platform they run on and have read-level credentials to experiment with value-added solutions in SharePoint.
• Change control systems — SharePoint's benefit is in consolidating access to and working on systems and web-based applications. If you have a change control system, you will want to integrate it into a workflow process in SharePoint to help with deployments. This can work well with both SharePoint and non-SharePoint deliverables from a tracking perspective.
• Ticket tracking systems — Tracking deployments, bugs, and help desk tickets can be integrated right into your Business Intelligence so you can monitor internal performance of different departments. They too can also be built into workflow.
• Partner data sources and systems — As your business grew, you likely developed relationships and data sharing as part of your operations. The good news is that much of this data is usually accessible once you have the firewall rules, IP addresses, and logins. Make sure to include this in your discussions with stakeholders because many of them may not think about bringing in data from partners to provide increased context to your analysis.

TRY IT

In this Try It you create a spreadsheet with headers and items that are important for discussions with stakeholders.

Lesson Requirements

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.

Hints

• Make sure to think about technical and non-technical requirements.
• Remember to focus on a department, team, or data set that is already out there.

Step-by-Step

1. Create a new empty worksheet in Excel and save it as SharePoint Planning.xlsx.
2. Across the top, list the major areas for planning from this lesson.
3. Down the side, begin to list possible data sources. This will help you select the combination of data sources that are already the best fit for prototyping.
4. Create a Word document with the topics in this chapter that will serve as a roadmap for working through these questions with stakeholders.
5. You can then fill in your spreadsheet with the answers you receive and then begin to research for your prototype.