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 2. Mapping Typical Business Needs

What is the best way to start to using the MicroStrategy platform? In this chapter will answer that question.

At first, we need to have our business needs clearly identified in order to design the solution to leverage the platform (the response we are looking for, the location of the data, the issue that we need to solve, the person responsible taking decisions with the information, and so on).

But prior to that, we need to understand what a BI solution is. According to Forrester Research:

"Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making"

When we use this definition, a BI solution also includes technologies such as transactional-source data systems, data transfer process, data repositories, final-user tools, and information distribution and control. But...