Microsoft Leading in Agile Business Intelligence

Forrester Report

The battle over customer versus internal business processes requirements and priorities has been fought — and the internal processes lost.

Game over.

Customers are now empowered with mobile devices and ubiquitous cloud-based unlimited access to information about products, services, and prices.

Customer stickiness is extremely difficult to achieve as customers demand instant gratification of their ever changing needs, tastes, and requirements, while switching vendors is just a matter of clicking a few keys on a mobile phone.

Forrester calls this phenomenon the age of the customer. The age of the customer elevates business and technology priorities to achieve:

• Business agility. Forrester consistently finds one common thread running through the profile of successful organizations — the ability to manage change. In the age of the customer, business agility often equals the ability to adopt, react, and succeed in the midst of an unending fountain of customer driven requirements. Forrester sees agile organizations making decisions differently by embracing a new, more grass-roots-based management approach. Employees down in the trenches, in individual business units, are the ones who are in close touch with customer problems, market shifts, and process inefficiencies. These workers are often in the best position to understand challenges and opportunities and to make decisions to improve the business. It is only when responses to change come from within, from these highly aware and empowered employees, that enterprises become agile, competitive, and successful.
• Information agility. Agile enterprises must gather customer and market knowledge and rapidly incorporate it into decisions. In order to support and promote business agility, enterprise knowledge workers need to be empowered with easy access to agile, flexible, and responsive enterprise business intelligence tools and applications. However, while organizations of all sizes made significant headway over the last several decades in their enterprise BI accomplishments, many organizations still struggle with making their data and information management, BI, and analytics environments agile.

Alas, enterprise grade BI platforms are often anything but agile. Indeed, all modern enterprise BI platforms are scalable and robust, support and promote a single version of the truth, and minimize operational risk.

However, these capabilities carry a hefty price tag of complexity, rigidity, and inflexibility, and as a result they are slow to react to constantly changing customer and business requirements.

Microsoft Leading in Agile BI

Through its Power BI suite based on Excel, PowerPivot, PowerMap, and PowerQuery.  Microsoft is leading the way in Agile Business Intelligence solutions that deliver real competitive advantage.

To find out more about how Microsoft Agile BI solutions can benefit your business, just contact us on +61 8 6210 8500 or view our Power BI Consulting Services.