Microsoft Mike Reese on Self-service Business Intelligence Deployment

Bruno: Hi, I'm Bruno Aziza and if you're a CIO, you're probably wondering how you can deploy self-service business intelligence across the organization? Well today, I sit down with Mike Reese who is at Microsoft. Thank you for your time.

And you're focused on new technology and adoption of self-service business intelligent across your organization. Tell us a little bit about what the organization is.

Mike: Absolutely, Microsoft is a big company and MSIT is big organization. Today, Microsoft IT is about 4,000 employees worldwide working on 2,000 applications and services that serve and population about 90,000 fill-time employees in 107 countries.

Bruno: And so when you think business intelligence as a service on top of deployed and make it available to employees, what some the issues you think about?

Mike: Well IT has a lot challenges and especially in the area BI, we worked to try to meet the business user requirements and needs in doing that. In the area of business intelligence, one of the areas that's always been challenging is been able to verify the users, the data of the users in a timely manner and such that they can make the decision that they need to make to run their business.

Bruno: So you have three types audiences really you're dealing doing with. One, information workers and executives who obviously want to get access to the information you --

Mike: Yes.

Bruno: Better decisions, if the business analyst that are building solutions themselves and then you need quick time to market so they can prototype and build the solutions to serve that information worker. And then you have IT, they want to monitor and manager and for compliance reasons wants to make sure if people have access to the right information. If you think about these three audiences, how to self-service BI the way you’ve deployed it help you help these different folks.

Mike: That’s the good question to ask because I mean other people should ask same type of question and it really does have couple from types of people. It serves those three entities. It serves the end user, you know the IW worker who wants to make it as the consumer with tools that they're familiar with in Excel and SharePoint. It serves the people doing the analytics with capabilities but they're also familiar with to build, employing data and build the solution and a place to share that out through publish into SharePoint where users can going interactively view the data. To IT, it provides a common place to host these solutions but not only give the users the benefits that they need but allows us now in a single spot, monitor track loads and trend of users as well what data is being used because before when their needs weren't met, data very often got pulled outside of the corporate systems into a Excel spreadsheets. They all them spread marks sometimes. You my have too and then when you get outside of corporate systems and nobody knows where they are, how many they are and what versions would they have in them.

Bruno: So you were telling me before this interview that IT doesn’t want to be in reporting business. So the solution really allows to do put that in the hands of business analysts and information workers to Go Solutions.

So, you can give us example on how solutions were deployed and more importantly their benefits?

Mike: Absolutely! So one the groups, are legal group had an existing reporting solution that was traditional design. And they found them in that that they wanted add a couple different dimensions, we call that but basically a little more reporting data on top on it because this the way they were tracking the usage of the tool and doing a training for the users in the organization. In less than a week, they were able to understand the tool, put together and pull together with data that they wanted to merge with existing reporting services data and create a solution that didn’t met their needs.

Bruno: Wow that’s the create example, been able to turn around and then serve the need using the infrastructure that you're supporting in IT. Now, there are a lot of things you can do. But what are the big things you're looking at moving for with the technology?

Mike: So I'm looking for moving with the technology. What we see is this provides the capabilities. It's a very powerful to be a part of it and meeting users needs and unmet needs that are in business. We've also found users do need to have some learning and getting up to speed but it's been much quicker and then other technologies that have been offered in the BI space. So it's was very quickly and it's not just for the IT. It's for the business users. We found that users and using this can also -- some of their needs were solutions that were typically very short in duration. There was one in the enterprise sales where they had a campaign that was only going to be six weeks in duration. Following the standard software process that IT follows in doing design, requirements and engineering and program management and testing deployed that the solution would have been immediate to the early stage of that before the campaign was done from hiding a tool like this, it gives IT the agility to the business user, I mean it like that.

Bruno: So you can do all of these while maintaining control. You want to tell us about what you're doing next in that area?

Mike: Yes so, for IT, also you know we can manage and monitor low its usage. The tool itself provides a lot of capabilities that attracts. One of the areas that were looking at is in data validation and how to inform users what the data source was, that was being uses in that solution and for the decisions they're making, when it was refreshed, how accurate it is and if we wanted to get to a point where some of these might validated and marked that this were from a validated source versus another ones who were just from the business and we’re always going to stay as business tip source.

Bruno: So what you been able to do here providing these self-service analytics, the ability for information worker and analyst to help themselves to the technology while maintaining the control and monitoring and the ability to offer these reporting abilities also to the issue themselves, what reports they're using and the ones that they should -- the date source of issues and so forth.

Mike: Exactly! I mean there are a lot of times where you'll see some of the business user say, “IT has their data in their data systems and are being very tight about controlling, getting their data back.” This provides in a way where IT would love to be able to do this. It gives them -- this is one step in the direction of being able let the users be more argillite to their business data.

Bruno: Great well thank you very much for your time Mike.

Mike: Thank you for having me.

Bruno: Until next time, I'm Bruno Aziza.