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 4. Scorecards and Dashboards – Information Visualization

The concept of scorecards and dashboards has become increasingly popular as organizations discovered their ability to communicate complex information. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are important distinctions between a scorecard and a dashboard.

While both scorecards and dashboards display performance information, a scorecard is a more prescriptive format; a true scorecard usually includes components such as perspectives (groupings of high-level strategic areas), objectives (verb-noun phrases pulled from a strategic plan), measures (attributes or metrics in our case), and stoplight indicators (red, yellow, or green status, which is managed by the thresholds in MicroStrategy).

Most dashboards are simply a series of graphs, charts, gauges, or other visual indicators that a user has chosen to monitor, some of which may or may not be strategically important.

Tip

Traditionally, the main difference between the...