Strategy Maps , Visio Services 2010 , Performancepoint Services 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 Business Intelligence

Dashboards are a very important end-deliverable in most of the business intelligence solutions. In Microsoft Business Intelligence stack of technologies, the same is developed using Performancepoint and hosted using Sharepoint. Scorecards, KPIs, Charts, Graphs, SSRS Reports are well known and commonly used constituent of any dashboard. But strategy maps is one of the less touched but quite valuable data presentation constituent on the real estate of any dashboard. Sharepoint 2010 now contains two services which would be of particular interest to the BI community : Visio Services and Performancepoint Services.

Performancepoint Dashboard Designer 2010 is a click-once application that comes as a part of Performancepoint Services in Sharepoint 2010. This can be thought of something similar to Report Builder that comes with Reporting Services in SQL Server.

Visio Services 2010 allows viewing of any visio diagrams hosted on sharepoint without any visio installation. If Silverlight is installed on the client machine, this diagrams would be displayed in an very interactive and appealing manner too. The interesting part of Visio services are it's data driven diagrams which allows binding of data from different data sources to the Visio diagrams. Watch or Download a demo of how you can bind data to a visio diagram using Microsoft Office Visio.

So now let's put these different chunks to use as mentioned in the steps below:

1) Bind the KPI data from analysis services to the strategy maps ( which can be created using Visio 2007 or 2010 ) and host this strategy maps on sharepoint 2010.

2) Using the Performancepoint Dashboard Designer 2010, create dashboards and link these strategy maps in a scorecard or web-part on your dashboard.

3) Visio Services 2010 would facilitate fetching of the data bound to the Strategy Maps (which is a diagram in Visio terminology) and display the visual accordingly on your dashboard.

This is what we call the better half of Microsoft Business Intelligence, i.e. Sharepoint Business Intelligence !!