Business Impacts of Microsoft Visio

To: John Smith

From: Shivangi Gosai

June 16, 2014

Regarding the discussion during the last company meeting, we ended up listing few applications that can help our business make the best use of resource to win our clients’ preference and trust. We being an IT solution provider, a better data visualization regarding the ease and convenience of which we can pull and show data has become much more critical need for our company as enterprises struggle with data and information overload.  In order to make better informed decisions using complex data, I believe Microsoft Visio is by far the best graphic design program that I have used compared to Thinkcell, EDraw, Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks. What I think is most beneficial about Microsoft Visio is the fact that it can provide the tools and artwork to visualize business processes and tasks in an easy graphical interface; and this comes without having to worry about the underlying data not being automatically pulled correctly from the source information document.

Fig 1. Design and implementation of operational dashboards

Here I demonstrate by giving example how Microsoft Visio can serve as a critical tool for the design and implementation of operational dashboards on the SAS information delivery portal that we do on daily basis. Starting with processing of data from different sources using SAS ETL tools, outputting a variety of stylized formats with SAS ODS,  publishing packages to the SAS WEBDAV server and customizing portal pages to accommodate different end users. By employing these steps, information is organized to be shared across the company and supports effective decision making on the SAS BI (Business Intelligence) platform. The most wonderful thing that can be done using Microsoft Visio here is creating the html files in Microsoft Visio and  publishing these non-SAS contents to the SAS WEBDAV server, and link them with SAS contents through the SAS portal. If done right, the program can help visualize most operational information into charts, graphs and objects. I was genuinely intimidated with how well Microsoft Visio performed amongst other software programs which are inherently less capable of doing what Microsoft Visio can achieve. When I began playing around with the software, I was overwhelmed with the compatibility it had with an excel spreadsheet. I was able to create a diagram by linking directly with my spreadsheets and at no point was there an error or break in the link. Anytime I changed the figures in excel, Visio automatically updated the corresponding charts. I think this is one of the strongest features of Visio our developers constantly tries to summarize data output into nice and easy charts that portray a clear message to the viewer. Once I saw this feature was available I started to think about the program we use at work.

Alternative:  Using the diagram created in visio on the portal, we can distribute different types of visual contents and applications to internal users, external customers, vendors, and partners. Also combining the portal along with the Publishing Framework, we can publish the visio content to the publication channels or servers repositories, to view the content on the channels. This personalization enables users to organize information on their desktops in a way that makes sense to them which can bring in the competitive advantage for our company

I  believe that using Microsoft Visio as a part of our work, it can serve as a source to increase the productivity by 35% , which in turn can help our business increase revenues by 28%. Following points are the reason that supports the raise in productivity and revenues:

Professional: Updated shapes to create engaging diagrams quickly. Formatting tools apply themes and effects in only a few clicks. Simplify complexity.

Collaboration: Improved commenting makes revising easier. Presence enabled – interact and iterate quickly. Setting up coauthoring is as simple as saving the diagram to SkyDrive, SharePoint, or SharePoint Online in Office 365. Once it’s there, whenever two or more people open the diagram, they are coauthoring. It can help us reduce up to 2 hours per one report generation on the portal instead of coordinating and communicating with coworkers to get the daily work done. Calculating overall time saved per entire day for  10 programmers can reach up to 20 hours .

Data: Connect diagrams to popular data sources, Visualize complex information with colors and data graphics, Create no-code dashboards with SharePoint and Office 365.

Due to this , it will help us generate dynamic reports with the dynamic visio charts.

Ease of use: Combining Visio with the portal which is a Web application will deliver all of its functionality through an easy-to-use and simple-to-understand web browser interface. The result is a powerful tool that uses an already ubiquitous interface paradigm and therefore requires a minimum of training for end users.

Security: Highest level of security can be attained using Access Control Instructions (ACIs) that are placed on the entities in the enterprise directory.

Visio uses vector graphics which means that any diagrams created should be scalable without any loss of quality, perfect for giving presentations, for example, which gives it an advantage over using other graphics software such as Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks, and has many more specific functions. One of the main advantages of using Visio as opposed to other diagramming software is that it shares a common interface with the other applications in the Microsoft Office Suite, and therefore much less of a learning curve is required to start using the software, if one is familiar with Office, which is generally the case, given the suite's ubiquity within most organizations. This is a major advantage where collaboration is essential, for example, where an Information Architect in our company must share receive input from clients, designers, creators of content to be placed on the site and so on, since it really only requires that a version of Office that includes Visio is installed, rather than specialized software that the other contributors wouldn't necessarily need.

As for the financial impacts of purchasing Visio for a company, the software is very comparable to competitor software’s in the market. Visio Standard can be purchased for $249 per user, which compares the same with ThinkCell at $248 per user. EDraw is another versatile diagramming program set at a price of $99 however EDraw has fewer features than Visio and ThinkCell which is why not many companies use the program. Going for Visio will cost us approximately $3000 for 10 computers as only the developer team will be using it and not all programmers. The choice to purchase Visio is binary in my opinion. If there is no need to do graphical design work, a company should not purchase the Microsoft program- there is simply no need for the functions. However, if companies use professional programs to help design their presentations, Visio is priced at a fair price against market competitors as it saves time and it is highly effective. The appealing aspect of purchasing Visio is that if a company can add a new client because their presentations look more professional, the software automatically pays for itself.

For any further questions, feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Shivangi Gosai

SAS  Programmer

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa140355%28v=office.10%29.aspx

http://www.mwsug.org/proceedings/2007/appdev/MWSUG-2007-A07.pdf