Over the last five or ten years it seems like everywhere I turn innovations in technology and a desire by corporations to manage the bottom line have conspired to “empower” me to serve myself. In most cases, I’m okay with this and view it as a step forward. On the professional front, as a 20-year veteran of decision support, data warehousing, data marts, and reporting and analysis solutions, I’ve been trying to enable business users so that they could serve themselves (versus total dependency on their corporate IT brethren) when it comes to getting the information they need to monitor and analyze the performance of their business. At the risk of oversimplification, I would say there are two key elements that must be in place to enable self-service for business users. . . .

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.

Prototyping is a crucial step in the development process, and PowerPivot is a great business intelligence prototyping tool.