Visual Insight as a Data Exploration Tool

Currently I am working on a project where we are doing a MicroStrategy environment assessment.  One thing I noticed is that there were a lot of dashboards and detail reports built.  This raises an alert for me because users will start exporting data from MicroStrategy and start doing data exploration in excel; which is what this particular client is doing.  Once the user starts exporting data to do data exploration in excel, we lose the following:

    1. Governance of dataVI
    2. Single version of the truth no longer applies

This raised all sorts of issues, but there is a simple solution already built in to the MicroStrategy tool for this exact purpose. Instead of exporting data, why doesn’t the client use Visual Insight to do data exploration?  With the new MicroStrategy licensing model, all MicroStrategy users have access to Visual Insight.  In addition converting detailed reports into Visual Insight only takes a couple of minutes to do.  Visual insight offers many different visualization options that helps user analyze their data ranging from bar graphs, heat maps, bubble charts and the list goes on.

One of the awesome new functions that Visual Insight allows a user to do is that they can now insert R script to do predictive analysis.  I came from a mathematic background and this is an especially cool function because I can create my own algorithms or take a copy of the predictive algorithm model and apply it to the data.  This is especially beneficial to my current client as their business relies on future trends to adjust their current operation. Visual Insight will bring the following advantages:

    1. Single version of the truth as the user is doing data exploration in a controlled environment.
    2. Once the schema has been built, it provides self-service and ad-hoc data exploration.  This will lower IT cost to create ad-hoc data reports.
    3. Better visualization and tools to help the business analyze their data.

By: Nelson Ning, Consultant

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