Our internal SKO (sales kick off) meeting was the beginning of this years’ MSTR World conference ( held in Miami, FL at the Intercontinental Hotel located on Chopin Plaza). As with every year, the kickoff meeting is the preliminary gathering of the salesforce in an effort to “rah-rah” the troops who work the front lines around the world ( myself included).
What I find most intriguing is the fact that MicroStrategy is materializing for BI all of those pipe dreams we ALL have. You know the ones I mean : I didn’t buy socialintelligence.co for my health several years ago. It was because I saw the vision of a future where business intelligence and social networking were married. Or take cloud intelligence, aka BI in the cloud. Looking back in 2008, I remember my soapbox discussion of BI mashups, ala My Google, supported in a drag and drop off premises environment. And everyone hollered that I was too visionary, or too far ahead. That everyone wanted reporting, and if I was lucky, maybe even dashboards.
But the acceleration continued, whether adoption grew or not.
Then, i pushed the envelope again: I wanted to take my previous thought of the mashup a morph it into an app integrated with BI tools. Write back to transactional systems or web services was key.
What is a dashboard without the ability within the same interface to take action? Everyone talks about actionable metrics/KPIs. Well, I will tell you that to have a KPI BY DEFINITION OF WHAT A KPI IS, means it is actionable.
But making your end users go to a separate ERP or CRM, to make the changes necessary to affect a KPI, will drive your users away. What benefit can you offer them in that instance ? Going to a dashboard or an excel sheet is no different. It is 1 application to view and if they are lucky, to analyze their data. If they were using excel before , they will still be using excel, especially if your dashboard isn’t useful to day to day operations.
Why? They still have to go to a 2nd application to take action.
Instead, integrate them into one.
Your dashboard will become meaningful and useful to the larger audience of users.
Pipe dream right?
NO. I have proved this out many times now and it works.
Back in 2007-2008, it was merely a theory I pontificated with you, my dear readers.
Since then, I have proved it out several times over and proven the success that can be achieved by taking that next step with your BI platforms.
Folks, if you haven’t done it, do it. Don’t waste anymore time. It took me less then 3 days to write the web services code to consume the salesforce APIs including chatter, ( business “twitter” according to SFDC), into my BI dashboard ( mobile dashboard in fact).
And suddenly, a sales dashboard becomes relevant. No longer does the salesforce team have to view their opportunities and quota achievement in one place, only to leave or open a new browser, to access their salesforce.com portal in order to update where they are at mid quarter.
But wait, now they forgot which KPIs they need to add comments to because they were red on the dashboard which is now closed, and their sales GM is screaming at them on the phone. Oh wait…they are on the road while this is happening and their data plan for their iPad has expired and no wireless connection is found.
What do you do?
Integrating salesforce.com into their dashboard eliminates at least one step (opening a new browser) in the process. Offering mobile offline transactions is a new feature of MicroStrategy’s mobile application. This allows those sales folks to make the comments they need to make while offline, on the road , which will be queued until they are online again.
One stop, one dashboard to access and take action through, even when offline, using their mobile ( android, iPad/iPhone or blackberry ) device.
This is why I’m excited to see MicroStrategy pushing the envelope on mobile BI futures.
Musings on ML, Deep Learning & AI 