Business Executives have specific requirements for how portals can help their organizations grow revenue and increase profits. Executives know that a scalable business model does not require additional human resources to increase profit. They are interested in establishing better processes, utilizing corporate knowledge, and providing their workforce with efficiency and collaboration tools. Efficiency is a means to enable growth with minimal costs. A successful portal implementation can enable revenue growth without additional human resources.
Executives are also custodians of the brand image their organization presents to its clients; they are interested in how SharePoint extranets enhance external relationships. Executives are faced with unique challenges in understanding content from disparate sources when interpreting organization health and progress on initiatives. Finally as project constituents, executives need to know that IT initiatives respect time line, budget and business priorities.

How We Help

We seek executive input in establishing and confirming project priorities and setting a vision for future initiatives; we want the executive to drive what the technology does for the business. We find that educating executives on the SharePoint technology from a high level during the Envision phase helps. SharePoint topics executives are most interested in are:

Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence with Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used to display information from disparate systems; creating new value in information by displaying it within a new context. How these tools provide better information to make critical business decisions easier and are accessible anytime, anywhere through the web.

Business Process: Business processes should be logical and easy to follow. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review, and archiving processes. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, companies can also create, maintain, and analyze custom workflows, enabling the streamlining of collaborative processes.

Electronic Forms: Electronic forms provided through InfoPath Forms Services are an integral part of such workflows. Electronic forms designed with InfoPath make it easy to collect and validate information that drives your business processes. The information can be collected and validated right from the Microsoft Office client applications in use every day.

Excel Services: Microsoft Excel often represents a source of critical information and analysis for organizations. Uncovering and publishing this content is a powerful way of creating a more informed organization. Excel Services, which is part of Office SharePoint Server 2007, extend the capabilities of Microsoft Office Excel 2007 by allowing broad sharing of spreadsheets, improved manageability and security and the ability to re-use spreadsheet models using a scalable server-based calculation service and interactive Web-based user interface.

During the Optimize phase of our service process, Portal Solutions experts work with our customers to enable services such as this. We believe that the business intelligence functions in SharePoint are exemplary and if used properly can significantly help a company make better business decisions.