PerformancePoint Moving into the SharePoint World

My colleague Mauro Cardarelli posted about this the other day:

By now, you have probably heard about Microsoft’s decision on the future of PerformancePoint Server (Microsoft Business Intelligence Announcement Q&A).  Kudos to friend Chris Webb for breaking the news… at least to me!

For PerformancePoint jocks, this is probably bad news, but as a SharePoint junkie, it sounds great.  Having even more Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities available in the SharePoint platform can only be good news.

Mauro’s concerns about his closet space aside, he’s right about the dearth of good talent working with SharePoint today.  But will this create a bigger mess or a bigger set of opportunities?  I think the latter.  This will allow organizations that already are using SharePoint to extend that use even further into the BI space.  Many organizations are already storing some of the data that can feed their BI in SharePoint, so the layering on of more tools simply gives them more options.  Yes, it will make the SharePoint platform bigger and potentially more confusing, and no, there aren’t a lot of folks out there who even understand all of what is included currently (myself included — it’s just too big!), but I expect that we’ll see more specialization inside the SharePoint space to make up for it.

Mauro is certainly right (as usual) that it’s some of the “softer” stuff (strong governance, solid information architecture, tight security models) that make or break SharePoint success.  Those things will become even more important as SharePoint’s capabilities expand.  As I always tell my clients, the best SharePoint developer is one who knows when *not* to code, but to take a step back and talk about the underlying business goals, processes, and incentive changes which are going to be required for the technology implementation even to make sense.