Much like how tools accumulate over time in your garage, an organization's BI tools are acquired over time from a variety of sources. Every situation is different when it comes to addressing BI capability overlap and tool redundancy, and I’ve seen organizations move in every possible direction amongst the main tool vendors. Still, several key principles should be applied in all cases.

In my last post, PowerPivot: A Cool Way to Prototype, I talked about the importance to prototyping a BI solution as well as consideration for using PowerPivot as a tool for developing a prototype solution. In this post, I’d like to discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of using PowerPivot as a prototyping tool for PerformancePoint dashboards and other Analytic Reporting solutions.

Given the analytical and reporting benefits of a well-conceived data warehouse, it is imperative to get it right the first time. You can maximize the success of your data warehousing initiative using industry-standard best practices.

I recently read an article about a new CEO’s “embarrassing problem.” It seems this CEO discovered there was no easy way for him to get a picture of what was happening in his company, no way for him to get the right information – the "single version of the truth" – he needs to accurately gauge the company’s true performance.