PerformancePoint Monitoring Extends Scorecards

PerformancePoint Monitoring extends the capabilities delivered in Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2005, which was released in Nov. 2005. Like its predecessor, PerformancePoint Monitoring focuses on the creation and distribution of the following:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs), which provide numerical representation of specific business metrics (sales of a particular clothing line in a specific region and reporting period, for instance), goals for those metrics, and typically some kind of visual indicator to represent the state of the metric compared to its goal
• Scorecards, which are tabular collections of related KPIs—for example, a scorecard might list the individual sales KPIs for all clothing lines
• Dashboards, which are complex reports that display scorecards along with supplemental information, such as a chart displaying year-over-year sales trends.

Business analysts use PerformancePoint Server’s design tools to define KPIs, scorecards, and dashboards and publish them to intranet Web sites built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), the document- and data-sharing service of Windows Server 2003, or SharePoint Server 2007. A number of PerformancePoint Server Web Parts let other workers view and interact with published KPIs, scorecards, and dashboards, and KPIs can be based on a variety of data sources, including SQL Server Analysis Services cubes.