Microstrategy Blog

I’m sure any MicroStrategy consultant who has worked on this kind of stuff before has dealt with…things change. In this case, I started working on the dashboard for my client, and it was going well, I had a basic graph that presented the inventory and sellthrough yada, yada, yada….but, what followed was a barrage of requests not for the dashboard, but new data points. Adding previously uncaptured extracts from the web and other systems so that MicroStrategy could normalize it all in one place and they could see MORE MORE MOREEEEE!!! There’s only two of us right now…and the other guy is a PERL guru…

It’s funny, when I started Orange Box I really thought that most of the business would be in the actual MicroStrategy development…I was wrong. Data points, web scraping for prices, feedback, randomness, then compiling, subdividing and filtering, all with the intent of eventually getting it into a report, we just haven’t reached the intent part yet. Know wat I mean folks? The taste of the dashboard made them data addicts. This is how heroin started…take note.

Business Intelligence is complicated.

IT people think that they have all of the answers for all of the problems, and that answer is “data”. Just give people the ability to drill through whatever it is that they want, the ability to pick whatever they want out of the giant metric bin of values, and they’ll solve problems, right?

In practice, it’s never that easy. The IT department seems to forget at time that while they might deal with the data, they aren’t the end user, and while they understand the warehouse, they don’t use it to make directional decisions. The response of some is just to throw it all out there, and have your user base sort through it, gleaning the pearls of wisdom that may or may not be there…don’t worry about the fact that accountants, finance department, managers, strategic planners, and executives have never used the tools before, and might not be technically inclined; that’s on them. Sometime the myopia of the data managers leads to poorly implemented systems.

In a great white paper by Kevin Quinn, VP of Product Marketing for Information Builders, he addresses this issue in depth.

He states:

Even a simple data warehouse has hundreds of columns of data, and it’s not uncommon for more complex systems to have thousands of columns. When an end user is faced with a blank canvas, thousands of columns of data, and hundreds of accessible features, complexity is automatic. “Where do I begin?” is often the first question, shortly followed by “I don’t have time for this,” or “I give up.”

It’s important to remember that while we might be quick to trumpet the value of in depth drill maps, predictive algorithms, and complex data mining tools, it’s the end user that uses the data on a daily basis to make the strategic decisions that a company requires. As a data warehouse and business intelligence developer, it’s not just our job to build systems, it’s also our job to take the time to ask the right questions. What works for the technically advanced, might be useless for the 90% of people who are not, and have neither the time, nor the drive to learn systems that might be our life blood.

In the 60′s, Theodore Levitt wrote the industry altering article Marketing Myopia where he criticized the marketing professionals of the time for their narrow understanding of the industries that they were in. Levitt concludes, “…the organization must think of itself not as producing good or services, but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it.” As BI professionals the end user is our customer, let’s make sure in addition to focusing on the warehouse life-cycle, and data freshness, we take the time to make sure that our user base wants to do business with us. We achieve that by starting the conversation:

What do you need?

I’ve been working towards it for a while, but a business partner and I finally buckled down and did it. We’re incorporated, and proper consultants now, which means I have to plug the business in an effort to make my millions (*sigh*).

The short version of the sale is this:

We focus on Business Intelligence for the small business. This means we help them create practical, scalable Business Intelligence application built on proper data-warehouses. The idea is to get them to use the free tools (SQL Express, PERL, PHP, MYSQL, Office Suite, and MicroStrategy Reporting…depending on client wants and needs) to start making use of their data properly early in their business life cycle. It’s never too early to start good habits. We get their data integrated early, while it’s less painful, and less costly, and then help them build into greatness.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while to keep the brain s harp, and the skills flexible. In the mean time I’m also juggling my enjoyable full time gig, and my MBA education.

Anywho…10 cool points to the person who gets the reference of the company name…WITHOUT GOOGLING you cheaters. Click through for the web site.

I’m done with my current quarter. I’ve mentioned before that I’m working on my MBA at UCI, and I’ve also started my own business in the BI field (finally Incorporated) and of course I have my full time real job, so if my once regular updates have fallen by the wayside…I’m sorry, mortgage paying endeavors take priority.

For good reading though, the Economist is talking about Business Intelligence, without using the word business intelligence of course…we leave that word for Stephen Few, and his acerbic wit. The thing I like about Few is his unwillingness to pay lip service to the big boys, just because they’re big boys…like he does with SAP here…

Meanwhile, I’m putting extra time lately into Tableau Public, though regrettably I won’t be able to make the visualization contest (I think, we’ll see how entertaining this weekend becomes), Spotfire (really digging it, if you have the time get the free download) and MicroStrategy Reporting V2 (can the Graph Matrix Widget compare to Spotfire). Here’s the problem with the MicroStrategy free reporting solution. They really just make that a bitch to update. The issue is that I have 2 installations (shhhhhhh), one on my desktop for pure development and this blog, and one on my laptop for showing off MicroStrategy bells and whistles development to other people. I consider myself a unofficial sales tool for MicroStrategy…regrettably with no financial incentives. So, in your “my account” in the download page at MSTR web page, to upgrade, you have to click your existing registration key, as if you were requesting it, at which point it says “oh yeah, here’s the link in case you want to download.” That’s odd….I figure you give download a little more priority over registration key, or maybe even separate sections in the account page? I know, I’m just being picky.

By the way, 4.0 last quarter in the MBA program. Suck it Statistics and Accounting. Linear Regression analysis is my bitch.

At this point I think that I’ve worked with enough instances and installations of MicroStrategy to know bad and good ideas when I see them. The most common irritation that I’ve come across is this idea that MicroStrategy is where all of the heavy lifting of the parsing and hierarchies takes place. While MicroStrategy can do the heavy lifting, this isn’t always ideal.

For instance:

I worked with a client whose Accounting General Ledger was your basic structure. Let’s say the account structure was thus:

Revenue accounts were 5000 – 5999
Cost of Goods Sold were 6000 – 6999
Expenses were 7000 – 9999

Now, in a MicroStrategy environment, one could create custom groups so that these GL accounts could be properly categorized that defines ranges, but that’s seldom the best way to go about it.

I have predefined categories that I know that I want postage as an expense to roll into. Postage -> Shipping ->Expense.

I create a table called GL_GROUP, which is the next level up of the hierarchy, and added a column to the GL_ACCOUNT able which was a reference to this new table. Here’s the GL_ACCOUNT table.

Note that the GL_GROUP_ID Column is currently Null.

The GL_GROUP table looks like this.

The script that accompanies this table is as such:

UPDATE lugl
SET lugl.GL_GROUP_ID=lug.GL_GROUP_ID
FROM GL_ACCOUNT lugl
JOIN
GL_GROUP lug
ON
lugl.GL_ACCOUNT_ID between lugg.GL_LOW AND lug.GL_HIGH

This has been incorporated into the ETL process so that as any accounts are added and they fall into the appropriate range (the Accounting people have to be on top of good logic on their side). Once complete, you get this.

Now, pull the GL_GROUP table into the Warehouse Catalog, add a GL_GROUP attribute, and modify your GL_ACCOUNT attribute so that it’s the child of GL_GROUP as a one-to-many. Now some of you will look at this and just go “Duh”, but you’d be surprised not only how many MicroStrategy installations I’ve come across where people have made Custom Groups to deal with this (because of the “ranges” of accounts). Custom Groups slow things down.

In short, let the Warehouse do the heavy lifting during your ETL process…and let MicroStrategy be a clean and streamlined as possible when it pushes the SQL through. MicroStrategy can solve this problem alone. But should it? I think not.