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During my years of industrial marketing and sales, I learned that there is a big difference between corporate information and Strategic Knowledge. Corporate information usually consists of internal raw data while Strategic Knowledge is the business wisdom necessary to achieve profitable growth consistently. Although internal data is necessary to manage logistic or tactical areas like, supply chain, manufacturing, accounts receivable, transportation, accounts payable or customer service; it’s far from enough to perform marketing and sales management jobs effectively, namely increasing market share, revenue and ultimately net profit.

The reason is simple, internal data is a by-product of the order entry system (ERP), designed to ship orders on time; not to build a strategic data base for marketing use.

Unfortunately, most Business Intelligence (BI) implementations populate sophisticated BI software with just internal raw data from the ERP.

This is only half of the story because ERP data does not usually contain competitive or market intelligence. This is the reason why BI usually does not provide the immediate strategic analysis and direction necessary to grow the businesses, leaving Marketing and Sales teams struggling to find the information they need to increase profitability.

Typically, after Sales or Marketing run BI reports several times and they keep seeing the wrong structure or hierarchy in their customers, markets, segments and territories, they stop using BI and continue making decisions the old fashion way: based on intuition.

by Bill Cabiro and Strat-Wise LLC

„Please visit their web site at www.strat-wise.com for additional articles and resources on the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Analytics”

Here's a quick tip to follow up with Answering Prompts via URL API. If you need to get the Object ID of an Attribute or Metric dynamically, you can use this syntax:

I read a lot about BI implementations failure. I wrote myself an article about it few months ago. But I have a question: what a BI implementation need to succeed? I ask this question also to the members of Business Intelligence Professionals on LinkedIn.

I recently read an interesting interview about mobile business intelligence, BI trends and cloud computing with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy. The interview was made by Jason Stamper from Computer Business Review, who is now widely regarded throughout Europe as „The Economist” of the IT industry.

I've noticed that in my experience, most users log into a single project. Either because there's only one project in the environment, or because the projects are specific to their department or function and it's the only one they have access to. With that, it's always slightly annoyed me that a user has to login and then click to access the single project they have.

I recently read, on Brett Beaubouef` blog, an excellent article about influences of business problems over the ERP solution. In his article, Brett said that in business, like in real life, all of us instinctively trying to avoid or minimize problem („pain”, as he named it). And also we are focused on eliminating the symptoms rather than finding the pain cause. „And we may feel temporary relieve”, noticed Brett, „but our short-term decisions only lead us to a point were the pain resurfaces and the available options to address the pain become more limited and costly.”

He proposes a three-step process to transform business pain in something good for your ERP solution.

The first step is taking an appropriate problem solving approach. Because, said Brett, many companies do not execute the problem-solving process effectively. Why? Cause they believe that having an ERP system simplifies the problem-solving process. As Beaubouef says, „the misperceptions and inappropriate expectations surrounding ERP can cloud your view of the real problem. For an ERP perspective, the typical end-result to quick fixes will be more customizations. The key to eliminating this quick-fix mentality is to change the perspective of how pain is viewed”.

Second step is to see business pain as an opportunity. Too often, organizations can’t see past the present pain. „We focus only on the symptoms (negatives) without looking for the opportunities (positives). A red flag to look for is when ERP support problems are seen as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity”, said Brett.

And, finally, the third step is using business pain as a driver to increase ERP value generation. According to Brett Beaubouef, frequent upgrades is the „single largest driver for long-term, rapid delivery of addition value from a customer’s ERP investment. It is important that the internal IT organization resist the temptation for a quick win and illuminate the IT roadmap that will provide the opportunity for greater value from their ERP investment”. Obviously, its a price for every decision made and „the short-term gains will eventually result in limiting your ERP strategy”.

As a conclusion, the business pain is the way that an organization (company) communicate that something is wrong. „Effective root-cause analysis is the first step to correctly diagnoses the pain and identify viable solutions. ERP can play a positive or sometimes negative role in addressing business pains”, stated Beaubouef.

One of the most important features to control in tuning your MicroStrategy environment is controlling Job Prioritization in the Intelligence Server. In the event that you have more concurrent jobs running than open slots on the database, queuing will occur. When a Job is in the Waiting status, that could be giving a very poor user experience. Fortunately, you do have some control to tell MicroStrategy which Jobs are more important than others. Today, I'll talk about how the Job Prioritization works, what options you have, and the Job Prioritization strategy that I use in my environments.

Job Prioritization occurs at the Database Instance and is a Governing setting for sending queries to the database. While there are Governing settings for the Intelligence Server to control concurrent jobs, those are system wide settings and are generally set very high (~100). The reason is that the Intelligence Server doesn't really have to do a lot of processing per job, at least compared to the amount the database has to do to retrieve the data.

Prioritization works by managing three slots: High, Medium and Low. By default, a job has Low priority. Jobs include not only Reports but also Prompt requests, and each Report on a Document counts as a separate job.

You can classify the priority of any given job in a number of ways, but the most direct is to setup the classification rules in the Job Prioritization Wizard. This can be found by opening the Database Instance for your Warehouse (Desktop -> Administration -> Configuration Objects -> Database Instances) and selecting the Job Prioritization tab, then clicking New. The wizard allows you to set global rules based on the type of job, the project it belongs to or the user requesting it.

by Bryan Brandow

(This article was first published on Bryan`s MicroStrategy Blog)