Dynamics and Business Intelligence: Is PerformancePoint the Answer for Dynamics Reporting?

At Convergence 2008 last month, Microsoft officials worked hard to make the connection between Business Intelligence and Dynamics. At one crowded session, they made the case for PerformancePoint being the tool for enabling BI in the future.

The future may be here sooner than expected, as Microsoft has begun looking to service providers across the globe to carry the torch and make a strong case for adoption.

One of the first to roll out BI capabilities via Dynamics CRM using PerformancePoint Server 2007 is Toronto firm TGO Consulting. "We jumped on it early," says Alan Whitehouse, the agency's lead BI official. The firm already has five customers "in various stages of deployment," says Whitehouse. The customers are in the nonprofit and distribution industries.

Performance Management is always a challenge to bring to a customer -- it is an amorphous vision of improvised "value" or "ROI" that can be difficult to realize due to various factors - adoption, quantity of data, the wrong reports, or poor distribution of reports, just to name a few. Microsoft has tried to create a vision of starting with the easy performance management - pre-built scorecards and dashboards.

Will customers share the vision? Certainly the interest is there, judging by the audiences at Convergence 2008 sessions on the topic. But what about real implementations?

According to Whitehouse, "As soon as customers see the capabilities across monitoring, analytics, planning and growth, the interest is very high."

The big challenge for customers is trying to envision exactly how to apply BI within their companies, he says. "In the back of their minds, they know what they want, but they have had difficulty expressing it," says Whitehouse. "When we show them PerformancePoint and ...