Individuals who are required to act without possessing a full awareness of the bigger picture, of the operations of the company outside their sector, will struggle to align their decisions with corporate goals. A comprehensive level of understanding is an essential tool at all organisational levels, from senior management through to individual employees. As a central component of a Microsoft BI strategy, PerformancePoint Server 2007 – a performance management application – can deliver insight and information thanks to it’s trio of monitoring, analysis and planning capabilities.

Monitoring
The monitoring functionality within PerformancePoint Server provides an understanding of what exactly is happening in your organisation, helping you ensure corporate goals are being met on time, and highlighting the performance of particular teams or divisions. Built into PerformancePoint Server is Business Scorecard Manager, a key monitoring tool which can quickly identify performance problems, to drive accountability and profitability. It allows the creation and management of custom scorecards and dashboards, and with it’s simple, familiar design anyone in your organisation can use it.

Analytics
Based on world-renowned software from ProClarity, PerformancePoint Server 2007 Analytics allows employees to create their own analytical processes without needing to call on IT experts. Users can utilise KPI’s and rich visualisation, as well as sharing and collaborating on analysis within the familiar Office 2007 environment. This technology gives individuals prompt answers to questions, letting them react quickly to opportunities and threats which would otherwise be hidden amongst a morass of data.

Planning
In many organisations long-term strategies are only updated “as required” because the time and work required to analyse all the relevant data makes an ongoing review uneconomical. However, with PerformancePoint Server 2007 plans can be updated dynamically and continuously, allowing long-term goals and strategy to be pushed into the planning, budgeting and forecasting process. An environment is provided where the broadest number of employees can contribute to and understand the direction of your company, helping ensure that crucial decisions are aligned with corporate policy.