Introduction

Business intelligence (BI) means different things to different people. For some, it means advanced analytics. For others, it is self-service report creation. A few see it as a prelude to Big Data. For many users, however, BI is much more accessible than any of these things. It is quite simply the regular production of clear and meaningful reports and dashboards that translate data into actionable information.

In my experience, all that a majority of business people ask for is up-to-date data that they can access when they want in a ready-to-use format. They do not always have the time or the skills to develop their own flashy output. Most end users have no desire to delve deeply into vast realms of data to track processes, sales, and targets. They want only to identify anomalies and react swiftly to changing business conditions.

So, despite all the hype, there is still a place for good old corporate business intelligence. This is the mixture of data, technology, and IT skills that creates and distributes “canned” reports in all shapes and sizes to a multitude of users across an organization. Despite being out of the spotlight (thanks to the glare of self-service BI), corporate business intelligence still solves the vast majority of enterprise reporting needs. It delivers reliable and trusted data to users who have only to select a few parameters to get the results they need.

This book is about energizing this forgotten, but fundamental sector of the BI universe. More specifically, it aims to show you how you can capitalize on a technology that you probably already have–SQL Server Reporting Services–to push your corporate BI to the next level. After reading this book you will be able to produce designer dashboards that integrate gauges, maps, charts, and text to deliver targeted information. You will learn to exploit the subtleties of a variety of visualizations (KPIs, sparklines, trellis charts, bubble charts, and many others) to give your reports real pizzazz. Specifically, you will learn how to make important trends stand out, while providing clear visual alerts to draw your attention to significant thresholds and deviations from targets. All this can be done via a solid and reliable toolkit that is used regularly by a vast developer community around the world.

In this book you will also learn how to revamp the appearance of your reports to make them more user-friendly. You will learn how to add slicers and other interactive tweaks to make your output better adapted for delivery to mobile devices such as tablets and cellphones.

This book is not meant as an introduction to SSRS. It presumes that you already have some experience of producing basic reports. The aim here is to help you to build on your experience to develop more advanced scorecards and dashboards and then to adapt the output for mobile devices.

In the book you will see dozens of visualizations that can enhance the ways in which business intelligence is presented. All of them-and more-are available on the Apress web site in an SSDT project. Feel free to take them as the basis for your own reports and dashboards, and to adapt them to your specific needs.