LESSON - Business Intelligence Be Nimble, Business Intelligence Be Quick
Efficient and Long-Term Plans for Business Intelligence
By Megan Lordeon, Director of Strategic Marketing, MicroStrategy
Leading companies are under pressure toselect and deploy business intelligence solutionsthat are both efficient and affordablefor the long term. Seasoned IT leaders realizethat business intelligence is a permanentstrategy; therefore, they plan for the longterm by selecting software and hardwarethat allows them to grow affordably andefficiently. Many have tried homegrown orcobbled-together solutions that eventuallybegan to drain corporate resources, as theywere expensive to maintain and time-consumingto administrate.
The new era of BI promotes the efficient use of human, network, and hardware resources. Companies with this type of BI solution can empower business users with interactive reporting, reduced report creation time, seamless reporting and analysis, and a reduced number of reports to design and maintain.
Empower Business Users
Interactive reporting enables businessusers to create and tune their reports withoutassistance from already overworkedIT staff or BI administrators. Companiesshould select a BI platform thatallows users to interact fully with theirreports in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get(WYSIWYG) manner over the Internet.Business users instantly see the effects ofany changes they make in reports that arefully populated with live data, makingreport editing easier.
The WYSIWYG design delivers Windowslikefunctionality over the Web, givingbusiness users a familiar and intuitivereporting environment. They can undoand redo their design ideas as often asnecessary to refine the format withoutrequiring assistance from IT developers.Thus, companies gain efficiency in businessuser empowerment and self-service.
Reduce Report Creation Time
The WYSIWYG design functionality radically reduces the time it takes businessesto deploy new reports. Without a BI platformthat has this design feature, reportdevelopers are required to develop theentire report through seemingly endlessiterations with business users. Companiescan eliminate the need for these onerousback-and-forth iterations by selecting aplatform with WYSIWYG functionality.
Without assistance from IT developers,business users can take ownership ofthe final steps in the design process bymaking their own finishing touches to thereport—changing report layout and formatby repositioning data and sections; addingor removing borders and background colors;changing fonts, headers, and labels; graphingdata; and even adding new calculations.
By streamlining report development, businessusers are far more efficient and IT staffare more effective.
Seamless Reporting & Analysis
More than ever, business users are crossingthe line from reporting to analysis, andfrom consuming data to investigating it.Select a BI architecture that offers the abilityto integrate both reporting and analysis,thereby truly meeting business users’ needsfor information without boundaries.
Reduce the Number of ReportsDesigned and Maintained
Business users should have the abilityto specify what content to include in areport each time they run it by answeringintuitive prompts. A single report designshould be able to produce hundreds ofvariations through a parameterized reportingcapability.
MicroStrategy ushers in a new era ofbusiness intelligence by delivering themost resource-efficient platform, builtfor affordable, long-term BI strategy.MicroStrategy has revolutionized interactive reporting by streamlining reportdevelopment for business users andIT staff, reducing the number ofreports designed and maintained, anddelivering more analytical insight ineach report.
This article originally appeared in the issue of .