Something's Gotta Give 2

It's hard to perform sophisticated analytics if the data captured at the transaction level isn't rich enough to support them. Fortunately, MBS has finally caught up with competitors by offering extra data dimensions at the transaction level. To its credit, Axapta has always featured a user-defined multidimensional account and transaction structure: But only recently have Great Plains and Navision offered similar user-defined transaction dimensions. Both Great Plains and Navision now include the ability to create unlimited transaction dimensions to classify transactions. Both products now offer drill down-enabled dimensional hierarchies, which assist with reporting transaction summaries at multiple organizational levels. These dimensions offer a level of transaction analysis far beyond the limited account segment dimensions both products have offered in the past.

Plethora of Portals

Portals are rapidly becoming the preferred means of distributing analytic information across corporate intranets. Portals are critical to assembling reports, tables, and charts into role-based views that are accessible over the Internet.

MBS delivers a number of portal offerings. Axapta has its Enterprise Portal, Navision has a User Portal and a Commerce Portal, and Great Plains and Solomon act as data providers to the MBS Business Portal. Even FRx is expected to offer its own portal offering, codenamed "Denali," which will combine FRx reports and Forecaster plans and budget views with other external documents and reports, such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

The MBS Business Portal is based on SharePoint technology. Today, the Business Portal can display various data sets drawn from the Great Plains and Solomon systems, as well as analytic data from a variety of non-MBS systems, as long as they can generate information in the Web Part "portlet" format required by SharePoint. From an analytics perspective, the most important third-party integration solutions are those offered by SAS and Business Objects (including Crystal).

MBS has largely ignored the interest (and hype) in performance management. However, both Axapta and the MBS Business Portal offer the ability to quickly create, manage, and view key performance indicators (KPIs) and combine these KPIs into corporate scorecards (Balanced or not) and management dashboards.

Looking Ahead

Analytics are what Microsoft now calls a "surround" application, which means that analytics function as a layer that crosses all the ERP/CRM application assets. In MBS terms, this layer is rather a mess at the moment as Axapta, CRM, FRx, Great Plains, Navision, and other internal Microsoft product initiatives continue to pursue their own agendas and develop their own vision of business analytics.

Let's gaze at the crystal ball and speculate about what we're likely to see in the next three to five years:

Microsoft knows that the long-term future of business analytics doesn't lie in the "surround" application approach; instead, analytics will need to become embedded into every business process. In my opinion, the future of analytics won't be in Gartner's "real-time analytics" vision — as useful and important as that view is in certain contexts, such as financial services dealing rooms. I believe that the dominant trend will be toward what many people are calling "operational," "in-process," or "in-context" analytics.

This form of analytics is so different from what is generally available today that it will require a fundamental rethinking of most business process automation designs — especially in ERP systems. Therefore, you shouldn't expect to see the operational style of analytics fully integrated into MBS applications before the end of this decade — probably around the time that the next-generation MBS applications initiative (currently codenamed "Green") first makes its appearance.

In the meantime, I hope that prospects, customers, and partners will try to persuade MBS management to spend a little more time rationalizing current business analytics offerings before the situation becomes even more complicated. Let's face it: Something's gotta give.

Stewart Mckie is an independent consultant and technology writer specializing in analytic, enterprise resource management, and Web services applications. You can reach him via his Web site at http://www.cfoinfo.com.