Book Image

Discovering Business Intelligence using MicroStrategy 9

Book Image

Discovering Business Intelligence using MicroStrategy 9

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence is a type of technology that has been proven to support business decisions in an organization. MicroStrategy 9 is a fully-integrated BI platform that makes Business Intelligence faster, easier, and more user-friendly. It enables businesses to generate their own reports and dashboards without the need for technical knowledge.This practical, hands-on guide will provide Business Intelligence for executives, as well as enable BI reports and dashboards without the dependency of IT savvy personnel. It will allow you to design, build, and share business relevant data in hours, in a secure way, including mobile devices and show you how to leverage your transactional information.This example-oriented book looks at the value proposition of cloud computing and the MicroStrategy platform, and features practical exercises for BI reports and dashboard enablement, including the design phase and best practices for when we design a BI report.The book begins with an exploration of MicroStrategy along with typical business needs. Our focus then shifts to best practices for BI reports and dashboard definitions from the functional stand point, with easy-to-do exercises that will allow you to enable the reports in the platform. You will learn about scorecards and dashboards, along with sharing the reports. Next, you will get acquainted with cloud-based services provided by the MicroStrategy platform. By the end of this book, you will able to design, enable, and share BI reports and dashboards without the need for comprehensive technical knowledge, and leverage the latest technology on the market.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 1. The Value Proposition of MicroStrategy

Sometimes when we hear about Business Intelligence platforms and related technology, our first reaction is a web report with tons of data to analyze and review, which has a slow and poor response time. Such platforms require IT-savvy personnel to enable them, as they are complicated to use. However, innovations in information technology have completely transformed the user experience and the way technologies are implemented.

When we implement technologies by ourselves with a do-it-yourself approach, the phenomena is called IT consumerization: technology for the final consumers without the complication of typical IT systems in corporations.

Imagine the same concept and approach translated to the Business Intelligence arena: a BI platform ready to use, simple to install, without specialized training or personnel to enable it, and ready to use our data in order to help us take business decisions.

In this chapter you will learn the scope of the MicroStrategy platform and how to enable it in a do-it-yourself approach without any specialized knowledge or training. Fortunately, MicroStrategy understands this consumerization trend and offers a platform and services that are easy to enable and be used by a business user. In a few hours, a business user is able to analyze information as well as generate reports and dashboards. Also, business users will be able to share their reports in a collaborative schema with their business colleagues, and also on a mobile platform for portability.