Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with
SharePoint 2010
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Table of Contents
Who Should Read This White Paper? ... 3
Challenge: Siloed Information and Processes Limit Business Performance and
Consume IT Resources ... 4
Surface LOB Data in SharePoint 2010 ... 5
Business Connectivity Services ... 5
Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes by Building Solutions on
SharePoint 2010... 6
Business Solutions in SharePoint 2010 ... 6
IT-Managed Solutions ... 6
Advanced User and Information Worker Solutions ... 7
Increase Productivity with Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence ... 9
Use the SharePoint Platform to Speed ROI and Decrease Business Risk ... 10
Conclusion ... 11
Who Should Read This White Paper?
Business users at every level of your organization should have access to important data and be
connected to processes that enable them to support operations. However, critical business data often is stored in disparate systems and ad hoc processes block efficiencies. Users call on IT to assist them in reaching and reconciling this business data, which can divert important IT resources away from strategic work that positions IT as a business partner, rather than a cost center.
This white paper is intended for Chief Information Officers, Chief Technical Officers, infrastructure managers and information system managers who want to deliver business-critical solutions while driving business value and reducing business risk. These solutions can be implemented across the organization and empower business users to get more value out of line-of-business (LOB) systems, thus extending the reach of important business data and improving business processes. This can be accomplished by connecting LOB applications to Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 to organize and facilitate broad access to previously siloed information.
This white paper explains how to:
Increase access to critical backend business data by surfacing it in SharePoint 2010.
Enhance the effectiveness of business processes by building on SharePoint 2010 and using its platform capabilities.
Deliver fast return on investment (ROI) by lowering business risk, decreasing training costs and enhancing compliance.
Challenge: Siloed Information and Processes Limit Business
Performance and Consume IT Resources
Most business-based IT applications are built for and deployed within vertical business functions, such as product lifecycle management (PLM) for design and engineering, customer relationship management (CRM) for sales and service, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for finance and human resources. Your organization is familiar with—or has even deployed—a number of these solutions, like PeopleSoft, JDEdwards, Oracle Financials or SAP. These applications support structured decision making and processes within the business function; nevertheless, silos exist between the applications and
organizational functions and processes. This environment can make it difficult for business users to drive collaborative decision making that crosses business units and spans multiple business functions.
Users who need access to the data that resides in these systems make frequent requests to IT to extract the information and organize it. These requests are compounded by users’ demands for anywhere, anytime access on a variety of devices, like laptops, smartphones, and tablets. This leaves IT to solve configuration, security, and compliance concerns, while stretching an already slim IT budget.
Surface LOB Data in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 offers a variety of ways for your organization to surface information buried in siloed LOB systems, so you can quickly begin to improve processes by building solutions that span departmental and even cross-organizational boundaries. For the purpose of this paper, we will highlight Business
Connectivity Services (BCS), the SharePoint 2010 technology that provides the core line-of-business connectivity capabilities. However, there are other options for connecting your LOB applications to SharePoint, including Web Services using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and more.
Business Connectivity Services
Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010 enables connectivity to external data sources, such as databases and LOB systems (Figure 1). When your LOB systems are connected to SharePoint, users can interact with business data from within the familiar Microsoft Office and SharePoint user interface, so they do not need to learn many complex applications to get their jobs done. This also enables IT to use a unified platform across a range of LOB systems to simplify administration and support.
Figure 1: BCS architecture diagram
Specifically, Business Connectivity Services can help your organization:
Address users’ collaboration needs by extending SharePoint capabilities and the Office user experience to include business data and processes. Example: A manufacturing plant foreman searches SharePoint to identify his peers in other plants so that he can reach out and discuss a machinery issue.
Create fast, incremental user-driven solutions like workflows and templates that position IT as a strategic asset within the organization. Example: The service department leverages a pre-built workflow for problem resolution that reduces response time and increases customer satisfaction.
Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes by Building
Solutions on SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 allows IT to focus on executing high-priority projects that deliver strategic business advantages, while maintaining a stable infrastructure. This is because SharePoint provides the right environment for IT to meet business demands by enabling business-critical processes within and across organizational boundaries. In turn, users can become more empowered, translating into increased efficiencies for IT and improved productivity for your organization.
Certainly, user empowerment is key to keeping your organization agile and productive. You can increase organizational agility by using the SharePoint platform to help users access, visualize, and consume the business-critical data currently locked in LOB applications. Plus, IT can maintain control through
centralized management and security tools, such as data storage management, backup, versioning, and records management.
It is important to remember that to achieve this level of business benefit, your organization must have a deployment plan that prioritizes business needs. By focusing on business needs, you can help to ensure that SharePoint 2010 is broadly adopted across the organization, which ultimately means that the right information can be delivered to the right people at the right time.
Business Solutions in SharePoint 2010
After connecting external systems to SharePoint 2010, you can begin to build solutions to improve the processes that are crucial to organizational success. SharePoint 2010 offers solution models to help your organization develop, improve, and extend business processes:
IT-managed solutions
Advanced user and information worker solutions
IT-Managed Solutions
When implementing or extending business-critical processes based on business data from operational systems, IT leads the way more often than not while ensuring that the right methodologies, security models and governance approach are being applied. Nevertheless, these IT-led project tend to be both complex and costly, making it hard for organizations to decide to take-on these challenges.
workflow engine, repository for storing information, and more. SharePoint provides all of these capabilities out of the box. By building applications on top of SharePoint, your organization can get started faster and deliver value to the business more quickly.
The SharePoint partner ecosystem gives organizations access to an extensive range of solutions from independent software vendors (ISVs) as an alternative to writing custom code, thereby providing sophisticated solutions in a prebuilt package. In addition to the partner ecosystem, a community of systems integrators (SIs) can help users to plan and deploy these types of solutions.
Advanced User and Information Worker Solutions
Advanced users have a deeper understanding of the tools and technologies that IT professionals often use to develop and deploy solutions (for example, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, Microsoft Access® Services, and Microsoft Visio® Services). SharePoint integrates with design tools to give advanced users greater flexibility in building solutions, while still promoting quality assurance and allowing IT
professionals to maintain control over finished products. Examples of advanced user solutions include creating a business connection from SharePoint to an LOB system and creating custom workflows to automate tedious business processes (Figure 2). To support the creation of these types of solutions, IT needs to identify advanced users and train them on self-service best practices, and establish governance to define how advanced user solutions are built and deployed.
Scenario: Advanced User Solution
Frank Zhang, a customer service representative for an engineer-to-order company, uses a SharePoint solution for order entry and change management. Business Connectivity Services provides integration with customer data, product catalogs, engineering specifications, on-hand stock availability, and pricing and discount information dynamically linked to various LOB sources, including master data repositories, engineering, and ERP.
Before implementing this process through SharePoint, Frank needed to access and assemble data from various systems to complete the order placement process. This often required exchanging multiple emails and Excel workbooks among various departments, such as Engineering,
Manufacturing, and Finance. With simplified and integrated access to all needed data in his SharePoint-based workplace, Frank now typically can manage order completion on his own, with fewer errors and delays. When needed, automated workflows take care of the process across various cross-functional teams, with shared information maintained in a single workspace (such as through Excel Services), helping to eliminate the need for inefficient ad hoc communications. Information workers can take advantage of out-of-the-box capabilities in SharePoint 2010 that increase productivity. For instance, they can leverage workflows and customizable views of their critical business data created by IT or advanced users. SharePoint 2010 also can create forms automatically based on templates within SharePoint and other Microsoft Office applications (Figure 3).
Further, information workers can create lists and document libraries that allow them to collect information, collaborate on documents, and share information easily. IT is tasked with publishing templates for the most common solutions and with teaching users best practices for creating lists and collecting information. For additional information about the advantages of user-created solutions, refer to the resources at the end of this paper.
Scenario: Information Worker Solution
Nina Vietzen, a customer service representative, used Microsoft SharePoint and Word to create her own solution for tracking customer inquiries and associated documentation. Custom
templates in Word allowed Nina to start with a standard document, while a centralized SharePoint framework provides document versioning, document metadata, and backup and restore.
Before Nina implemented this process through SharePoint, users had to create new Word
documents for each customer inquiry and store them in a file share without version control. Now, versioning, metadata and search, and central backups provide Nina and her colleagues with a time-saving solution that keeps documents safe.
Increase Productivity with Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence
SharePoint 2010 includes multiple capabilities with built-in security and manageability that IT can deploy to help improve business user productivity based on accessing and visualizing the business data. Two of these key capabilities are Search and Insights.SharePoint Search enables cross-platform search to help business users consume and manage important business data. SharePoint 2010 Search provides an interactive, visual search experience. Visual cues help people find information quickly, while refiners let them drill into the results and discover insights.
Example: An account manager receives a customer request to adjust a custom order. Before responding
to her customer, she must determine whether any of her organization’s warehouses have the items in stock to amend the order. Her ERP system is connected to SharePoint 2010, so she opens up her team portal, searches for the part, and finds that it is available in two warehouses.
SharePoint 2010 Insights provides interactive dashboards and scorecards that can help people to define and measure success: key metrics can be matched to specific strategies and then shared, tracked, and discussed. Users can create meaningful visualizations that convey the right information the first time, aggregating content from multiple sources and displaying it in a web browser in an understandable and collaborate environment. Moreover, rich interactivity allows users to analyze up-to-the-minute
All employees have the
responsibility to make the best
decisions possible, based upon
the data
available to them at
any time. If their ability to
analyze this data and transform
it into useful information is
improved, the overall quality of
their decisions can be improved
as well.
- Michael Schiff
Founder and Principal Analyst, MAS Strategies Figure 4: Dashboard in SharePoint 2010 Insights
Use the SharePoint Platform to Speed ROI and Decrease Business Risk
Using SharePoint 2010 to surface business data from your LOB systems and build solutions can increase the ROI of your legacy systems, speed solutions’ time-to-market, and empower users to helpthemselves—all of which frees IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Business units can reduce training costs because SharePoint 2010 offers the familiar Microsoft Office experience that enables people to quickly and easily adopt SharePoint (as opposed to training users on a variety of more complex LOB applications).
The ability to access accurate, real-time business data has a major impact on your organization. In his 2009 white paper, “Business Intelligence: A Guide for Midsize Companies,” MAS Strategies’ Founder and Principal Analyst Michael Schiff said, “All employees have the responsibility to make the best decisions possible, based upon the data available to them at that time. If their ability to analyze this data and transform it into useful information is improved, the overall quality of their decisions can be improved as well.”
When you surface all relevant data to the people who need it when they need it, you enable them to make better decisions faster. This can reduce mistakes that result from misinformation and decrease your organization’s business risk.
SharePoint also reduces risk by enhancing security, privacy, and compliance through a flexible
authentication model. This authentication model can help your organization to maximize its SharePoint 2010 deployment while maintaining highly secure control over corporate assets to increase compliance.
Conclusion
This white paper has discussed extending the reach of your business-critical data across departmental and organizational boundaries to improve business-critical solutions. It also has shown the benefits of
surfacing and visualizing this data in SharePoint 2010:
Surface LOB Data in SharePoint 2010: Identify business-critical data and the users who need it,
and extend the reach of your data by connecting SharePoint to your LOB applications. SharePoint 2010 provides many ways to achieve this state, faster and easier than in previous versions and without complex, expensive custom development.
Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes: Find and visualize the information you
need in SharePoint 2010. Take advantage of out-of-the-box platform capabilities like
collaboration, social computing, and content management to enable the right people to access the right information at the right time. IT can design and administer solutions quickly so that users can build their own templates and workflows to connect business data to their processes.
Gain Additional Productivity with SharePoint 2010: SharePoint provides several capabilities,
including Search and Insights, that can help organizations to improve workforce productivity and visualize their business data in real-time. These capabilities have built-in security and
manageability to help ensure safe and easy use.
Speed ROI and Decrease Risk: Connecting SharePoint 2010 to your LOB applications can increase
the ROI of these systems and decrease business risk by surfacing important data across the organization to users who need it, when they need it. Plus, out-of-the-box capabilities in
Resources
Learn more about the SharePoint capabilities outlined in this white paper by visiting the following:
Related whitepapers:
o Creating a competitive edge with SharePoint 2010 and JD Edwards
o Benefits of migraton to SharePoint 2010
o Total Economic Impact of SharePoint 2010
Additional resources:
o Microsoft SharePoint website
o Business Connectivity Services overview
o Composite applications and composite application development
o SharePoint Partner Finder page (ISVs and SIs by area and vertical who can help to
architect and deploy SharePoint solutions)
