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Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005

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What is Business Scorecard Manager?

Introducing Microsoft's new server-based business performance management scorecard application. The new application leverages the power of the Microsoft Office System to help organizations build, manage and use scorecards and key performance indicators (KPIs), and perform deep analysis — all within an intuitive, collaborative environment. Business Scorecard Manager gives companies a broad view of business opportunities, through which employees can better understand business challenges, effectively shape solutions and quickly execute on their objectives. Decision-making happens across all levels of an organization, and empowering employees with powerful business intelligence (BI) solutions can help them have greater impact.

While Business Scorecard Manager provides rich "out of the box" functionality for scorecarding and dashboarding, ISVs have an opportunity to extend these capabilities to either add advanced BI analytics to the product or integrate scorecarding with LOB applications.

Web services and SharePoint technology extensibility are made available for ISVs to take advantage of to build, integrate and customize Business Scorecard Manager.

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Download from MSDN Subscriber Downloads:

  • Visit https://msdn2.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ and log in to MSDN Subscriber Downloads.
  • Under Subscription Benefits, click on Subscriber Downloads.
  • On the left-hand Table of Contents, click on Applications > Office > Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 to access the download.

Business Scorecard Manager Features and Benefits

Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager

Dramatically enhancing the BI technologies originally released in the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator last summer, Business Scorecard Manager is uniquely suited to business scorecarding projects in which ease of use and deployment as well as integration with Microsoft Office System solutions are important. Business Scorecard Manager allows a company to do the following:

  • Align actions with strategy. Many companies struggle to articulate business strategies and align employees’ daily activities with those goals. Scorecards built with Business Scorecard Manager provide a reliable and pragmatic approach to how businesses define strategy, provide information and access to all employees, and show how projects align with KPIs and objectives. Business Scorecard Manager allows scorecards, initiatives and action plans to be monitored, managed and measured throughout the organization.

    A scorecard helps companies articulate their high-level objectives (things that matter most) such as “customer satisfaction.” These objectives are broken out into supporting objectives that people are responsible for, such as “product quality.” At the bottom of the list are the KPIs — a KPI could be “returns.” With the scorecard approach, individual employees can monitor a KPI that connects to a high-level objective. In this way, companies can ensure that their actions align with their strategy.

  • Gain complete insight in context. Business Scorecard Manager helps companies make sense of their business data by putting it in the context of KPIs. Users can gain deeper insight by combining Business Scorecard Manager's rich scorecarding functionality with reports, charting, graphs and analysis tools as well as unstructured data such as documents, spreadsheets and Web sites.

    In a scorecarding environment, companies need to be able to gain deeper insight into information on a KPI. For example, if a user clicks on a KPI titled “net revenue,” that user could view a chart showing net revenue over time. He or she could also view a report that shows revenue by region and could view a PivotTable® report that shows the underlying information that was aggregated into the KPI.

  • Collaborate on business management and action. Business Scorecard Manager provides a robust framework for interpreting and working with business information, allowing people to not only understand data in its appropriate context, but also more effectively collaborate on group analysis and take action to improve business performance.

    By using annotations, users can work together to provide more insight on a specific set of metrics. In addition, users can assign tasks specifically related to a KPI and/or a scorecard to the appropriate people. Users can also share scorecard data via e-mail.

  • Empower employees to monitor and deliver against key metrics. Integrating with easy-to-use tools such as Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions, Business Scorecard Manager empowers end users to build, manage and use scorecards. At the same time, Business Scorecard Manager leverages companies’ existing skills, technology and investments to help them get more value with less cost and time.

    With Business Scorecard Manager, end users can build their own scorecard using an intuitive scorecard builder application. Users can create their own site, which allows them to choose the KPIs and scorecards they want to track, as well as update targets.

  • Achieve extensible functionality. Business Scorecard Manager offers a scalable platform that enables the customization that independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) need to extend its functionality or integrate scorecards into line-of-business applications or other custom applications.

    ISVs and SIs can extend Business Scorecard Manager by adding their SharePoint-based analysis tools as the insight tool for KPIs. ISVs have different types of data visualization and charts that can be put into the context of a scorecard.