I must admit I have not spoken to people at Verizon Business or their software vendor, Something Digital, but I had to share this case study with you all. In short, it says Something Digital built a revenue assurance dashboard using Microsoft Silverlight as the front end, and Microsoft SharePoint as the back end. MS SharePoint as the back end to an RA system?!? If they had said SQL Server I would have understood. The question that comes to mind is: how does the SharePoint back end work? SharePoint is a platform for web collaboration and publishing – yet Something Digital says that users can drill down into the detail of where orders have not been processed, services are not billed, or billing is ‘improper’:
Essentially, we designed and built a user interface that would make it easy to highlight exactly where revenue was being lost throughout the organization, for both operations personnel and executives. Once an item was flagged, indicated by a red light, users could drill down to the raw data illustrating the problem.
According to Wikipedia, SharePoint can be used for:
developing web sites, portals, intranets, content management systems, search engines, wikis, blogs, and other tools for business intelligence.
Is this a surprising extension of the BI capabilities of SharePoint, used to serve the goals of RA? Or is there another back end behind the ‘back end’ of Sharepoint?
Eric, SharePoint has come a long way in recent years. Each new version has included substantial increases in functionality. The latest (2010) version does include a set of features for BI reporting (‘performance point’).
Whether or not SharePoint is the best tool for supporting RA activities, I do think manyof the issues included under the RA umbrella can be addressed by more generic tools/technologies and indeed are in other sectors (e.g. data quality/integrity, master data management, etc.).