Our MicroStrategy and BI Expert Jim Butz spoke at the Gartner IT Expo today on the power of augmented analytics. In short, he pushed that data and insights only matter if you can easily access them and if you have the ability to act on the insight. To that end, your business intelligence (BI) tools must enable that. He gave two demos that highlight the key use cases of accessibility and actionable.
MicroStategy’s approach is to make it easy to embed insights in any channel and any application.
Jim presented with Vijay Anand of MicroStrategy.
Most organizations under-utilize their data because they fail to break down silos. There are three opportunities here:
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Empower more users with natural language generation.
- Help those who don’t understand data to build a dashboard with simple questions like, “What is my revenue?”
- Vijay showed a quick demo building a dashboard.
- He highlighted that with the easy integration from MicroStrategy, you can create an Alexa skill.
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Elevate the overall knowledge of your workforce with embedded analytics.
- MicroStrategy has a brand new technology called hyper-intelligence.
- Imagine embedding insights into any application with a simple card
- Example: email asking to meet with Lee Bank. The email has the name as a link
- Hovering over it gives you key information on Lee Bank
- Names in the bank are also contextualized and pulled from your CRM
- Note: because this is contextual, you don’t even need to ask a question.
- You just made every application more intelligent
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Context-based recommendations on mobile with augmented analytics.
Accessible
Jim started with a demo on an augmented reality mobile device.
Underlying theme: Integrated. Combining or coordinating separate elements to provide a harmonious, interrelated whole.
Users want insights integrated with their business processes, systems, and other records. They want BI to find them vs the other way around. It’s not about a proprietary interface like what you typically see with other BI tools.
Demo:
- You can combine data and context.
- Take a store manager who wants to analyze how a product is performing. Rather than go to a desktop to find a product performance report, they can instead take a tablet with them to the store floor.
- He pointed his tablet camera at a product and immediately identifies it.
- You can drill into the data.
- Drilling deeper into it to get a detailed view all about hat product performance
- Now the store manager is on the floor and engage.
Actionable
In a second use case, Jim showed an order management or stock-optimization scenario. No one wants empty store shelves. Most companies have “dumb alerts” in the Order Management system which is based inventory. But if you combine MicroStrategy with predictive analytics, inventory, and point of sale data to give you a better idea of what’s happening. This gives you a better context to make a decision.
Demo
- Used Slack to simulate a POS by scanning the barcode
- It triggered an alert in Slack and notified the responsible buyer
- Clicking on the link launches a dashboard
- Note the integration that takes you into the right place. It’s context driven
- Here is sales, inventory, and forecast model.
- It includes an alert in plain English what it recommends
- In the spirit of integration, you can place the order from the dashboard.
- Users don’t know where the system starts or stops. They don’t care
- This also integrates to Salesforce as well. (see below)
- This highlights the account and makes recommendation for inventory level change.
Bottom Line
It’s not longer about silos. You can manage your business by getting the information in the right context regardless of where you or your products reside. This brings productivity not thought possible, all at the touch of a button.
