The modern market for Business Intelligence (BI) tools is full of various products with different advantages and disadvantages. For example, some of them are easy to deploy but hard to maintain. Another has strong data discovery capabilities but restricted data governance and struggles with complex enterprise data models. MicroStrategy 10 is one of the leading platforms on the market, can handle all data analytics demands, and offers a powerful solution. It combines self-service BI, data discovery and preparation, and big data exploration, bringing the vision of a single-vendor solution within reach of BI and analytics leaders. It combines data discovery and enterprise BI in a single platform, allowing organizations to invest in a single vendor that provides both agile self-service BI and traditional reporting, with integration between the two.
This chapter will cover:
- BI best practices
- BI maturity model
- MicroStrategy 10 new features
- Deploying MicroStrategy 10 on top of Linux
- Deploying business case
According to a Gartner survey conducted among 2,800 CIOs of top companies, BI and analytics remain the number one investment priority. MicroStrategy has done a great job since 1991. MicroStrategy is a leader in Enterprise BI and can handle the modern demand for BI and analytics.
MicroStrategy 10 can easily handle modern hot topics such as big data analytics, predictive analytics, and mobile analytics. It is easily scalable and secure.
The main roles of BI are to discover new opportunities, improve processes, help to make the right decisions at the right time and reduce operational costs. As a result, BI tools should improve business performance and help to meet organizational goals, such as higher revenue, lower costs, and decreased risks.
Nowadays, we see lots of BI tools. Sometimes, we have to ask "What is the best BI tool?" In order to find the answer, we can look at reports from two main analytical agencies: Gartner and Forrester. Here is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics Platforms for 2015:
This quadrant shows us the leaders in the market. But do not trust this rating, because it is a kind of marketing. The best way to understand the pros and cons of any BI tool is practically; just download and install a trial version and play with it. Most tools, especially the leading ones, have common functionality or similar features. A good example is the interface of Tableau. It is so good that other companies have tried to reproduce it in their own products.
Every organization uses BI. The question is, just how good are they? Even if the organization does not have BI at all, it at least uses spreadsheets to consolidate numbers. This is also a kind of BI. We can observe many levels of BI maturity. Let us try to demonstrate this, based on four phases shown here:
The first phase is Scattered Reporting, in other words, the organization doesn't have any BI solution and even doesn't try one. Various departments grab data from transaction systems and try to figure out what's going on. We see this situation especially in startups or small companies. It is the most inefficient way to measure business and make decisions.
The next phase is Centralized BI Solution. It is the most common approach nowadays, when organizations build corporate data warehouses, integrate data from internal sources and systems, deploy a BI solution, and try to force everyone to use a single point of truth. It is a long journey to leave this phase, and sometimes it is an endless process because business constantly changes.
The third phase is Big Data Analytics. Despite the fact that the term big data is almost gone, we still use it, because it is a very popular phrase that means lots of unstructured data such as social data, open source data, and so on. In other words, organizations try to enrich their internal data in order to find more insights. As a result, companies are forced to use new technologies such as Hadoop or NoSQL datastores. In addition, companies start to use machine learning technologies and try to make them part of their BI framework.
The last phase is Real-time Mobile Business Insight. This phase means that finally organizations can focus on the speed of delivery of business insights, their mobility, and predictive capabilities.
Of course, this maturity model is not standard, we just tried to structure BI maturity levels based on our experience. MicroStrategy can handle even the final phase, a real competitive advantage.