Microstrategy Dashboard

A Microstrategy dashboard is simply a reporting and business intelligence platform designed around the Microstrategy set of business intelligence and reporting tools. Microstrategy dashboards have had a fair amount of popularity within large organizations as alternatives to dashboards from companies like Business Objects or Cognos. While the Microstrategy dashboard provides a number of advantages vs. more established enterprise players it also has significant drawbacks that make using a Microstrategy dashboard in mid-market or divisional applications harder.

Advantages of the Microstrategy Dashboard

A Microstrategy dashboard can provide a number of advantages when measured against established players like Cognos or Business Objects. The flexibility of the Microstrategy dashboard far outweighs the heavily restricted and traditional Cognos or BO models and the Microstrategy dashboard provides for a more rich user experience through more intuitive controls and the ability to build fairly sophisticated dashboards without involving IT during the process. Despite some of these advantages, however, the Microstrategy dashboard was built with heavy IT support in mind and is not well suited for mid-market applications.

The Microstrategy Dashboard and the Mid Market

In mid-market companies or companies that do not possess heavy IT resources, the Microstrategy dashboard begins to become problematic. There are a number of deficiencies that the Microstrategy dashboard imposes, but among the most important are the cost of deployment, the cost of management and the lack of report and dashboard approval and collaboration features. The multi-application model that a Microstrategy dashboard uses places a heavy burden on IT resources and can be exceedingly costly over the course of the life of the product.

Drawbacks of the Microstrategy Dashboard

Among the chief drawbacks of the Microstrategy dashboard are cost of deployment, cost of ongoing maintenance and a lack of collaboration in the platform. The cost of deployment of a Microstrategy dashboard is hampered by two factors, first is the simple fact that a Microstrategy dashboard is made up of many components and client platforms, each of which has to be installed, deployed and trained separately. On an ongoing basis the Microstrategy dashboard also is significantly more expensive to manage because of the numerous components that must be managed separately.

Collaboration and the Microstrategy Dashboard

One of the hottest areas of development int he dashboard business is the concept of collaboration in the business intelligence arena. The concept of collaboration for dashboards involves giving users the ability to post comments and have discussions around dashboard elements. A Microstrategy dashboard is severely lacking in this area in features and functionality. Another weakness of a Microstrategy dashboard is the lack of approval tools. With a Microstrategy dashboard you have limited if any ability to create an approval path for dashboards and charts.