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)

Scorecards versus dashboards


The definition of a scorecard and a dashboard is now clear, but how do they look? Where do we start? When should we use a scorecard or a dashboard? There is no perfect answer to these questions; however, the rest of this chapter offers a practical guide to define the best option for your business needs.

A scorecard typically looks like the following screenshot:

A scorecard displays progress towards specific goals and performance measurements over time. It also validates the measures in order to take actions for corrections, that is, it outlines high-level grouping of data, such as region, year, and quarter using licensing and consulting revenue as a metric, along with the threshold to highlight spotlights.

A dashboard looks like the following screenshot:

This indicates the status of the analyzed data at a specific point in time. The best way to start designing is by identifying your specific business need.

The following table typifies the more common types of scorecards...