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Key considerations for financial services institutions
when selecting a BI solution
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This product is patented. One or more of the following patents may apply to the product sold herein: U.S. Patent Nos. 6,154,766, 6,173,310, 6,260,050, 6,263,051, 6,269,393, 6,279,033,
6,567,796, 6,587,547, 6,606,596, 6,658,093, 6,658,432, 6,662,195, 6,671,715, 6,691,100, 6,694,316, 6,697,808, 6,704,723, 6,741,980, 6,765,997, 6,768,788, 6,772,137, 6,788,768, 6,798,867, 6,801,910,
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7,113,993, 7,127,403, 7,174,349, 7,181,417, 7,194,457, 7,197,461, 7,228,303, 7,260,577, 7,266,181, 7,272,212, 7,302,639, 7,324,942, 7,330,847, 7,340,040, 7,356,758, 7,356,840, 7,415,438, 7,428,302,
7,430,562, 7,440,898, 7,486,780, 7,509,671, 7,516,181, 7,559,048, 7,574,376, 7,617,201, 7,725,811, 7,801,967, 7,836,178, 7,861,161, 7,861,253, 7,881,443, 7,925,616, 7,945,584, 7,970,782, 8,005,870,
8,051,168, 8,051,369, 8,094,788, 8,130,918 and 8,296,287. Other patent applications are pending.
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Key considerations for financial services institutions when selecting a BI solution
As a result of the global financial crisis, financial services institutions
There are four major factors to consider that impact the TCO of a
have come under greater scrutiny, and the environment in which
BI platform:
they operate is increasingly characterized by unprecedented
1.E fficient Product Architecture
economic, regulatory, and technological change. Now, more
than ever, decision makers need to be sure that their technology
investments will pay off—choosing the right business intelligence
2.Flexible Reporting Structure
3.S elf-Service Capabilities
(BI) solution is no exception.
4.Administrative Efficiency
Like most things, the total cost of BI is not limited to what you pay
Efficient Product Architecture
upfront. In fact, leading analysts have concluded that as much
as 75% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with BI
consists of the costs of paying IT personnel to develop, deploy,
and administer the software. It’s clear that selecting a BI platform
that reduces administrative costs and the labor burden on the IT
organization will have a significant impact on the TCO and ROI of
the solution over the life of the investment.
The efficiency, utility, and lifespan of a BI platform are heavily
dependent on the strength of the technology’s underlying
architecture. However, many products sacrifice long-term
efficiency for quicker short-term report development—an
immediate-term win that causes nothing but headaches and rework for IT down the road.
An efficient product architecture allows IT to do the groundwork
development once, and build from there. There are two important
Figure 1: Three year
total cost
of ownership
distribution.
Three
year
total cost
of ownership distribution
1.4%
3.5%
1.9%
45.1%
• A single, centralized, and shared metadata for all reporting,
48.0%
5.8%
7.4%
things to look for when reviewing a product’s architecture:
analysis, and monitoring needs
8.0%
• A high degree of object reusability to limit the number of one87.7%
Business User
+ IT Admin
42.6%
84.3%
Business User
+ IT Admin
36.3%
1-99 Users
100-249 Users
2.6%
5.4%
off requests of IT
4.4%
3.1%
43.4%
48.3%
14.8%
10.3%
Business User Admin
IT Admin
77.7%
81.7%
Business User
+ IT Admin
33.4%
Business User
+ IT Admin
34.3%
The tool needed to be as flexible as possible, we
Software
needed
a solution that allowed us to grow and
Implementation
Hardware
250- 999 Users
Business User Admin
>1000 Users
evolve together with our business. We saw different
projects implemented in companies similar to ours,
IT Admin
we analyzed different industry publications, and we
Software
finally selected MicroStrategy.”
Implementation
Hardware
José Luis Neve
Business Planning & Management Control Manager
Banco Patagonia
microstrategy.com 3
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Flexible Reporting Structure
Administrative Efficiency
A good BI tool is able to provide answers to a large number of
As the scope of BI expands at your organization—with more data,
business questions with a relatively small number of reports
more users, and more applications—administrative efficiency
and dashboards. Having fewer reports significantly reduces
becomes a key driver in lowering TCO. Yet, in the software
development time and the amount of IT effort (and cost)
evaluation process administrative and automation tools are often
associated with building and maintaining the BI system. A high
undervalued. Choosing a platform with a comprehensive suite
degree of report flexibility means that different business users
of administrative tools can drastically reduce the time and effort
can answer different business questions using the same report.
necessary for IT to develop, deploy, and monitor a BI environment.
The key capabilities of a truly flexible reporting environment are:
By automating time-consuming, but largely repeatable tasks, the
• Administrators can personalize reports for specific users
right BI platform can drastically cut the number of man-hours
• Developers can add prompts to reports and dashboards
• Business users can conduct ad-hoc drilling and analysis
required by IT to keep the environment up and running—allowing
them to get back to focusing on the projects and initiatives that
deliver the most value to your organization.
Self-Service Capabilities
Trying to limit the load on IT is all well and good, but the realities
of finance are that business users and analysts will always have
specific, spur of the moment requests that need attention. For
many traditional enterprise solutions this means countless
business requests to IT, long resolution times for those requests,
unhappy business users, and a tired, overworked IT staff.
However, it does not need to be like this. Modern BI solutions
provide self-service capabilities in addition to the standard
enterprise reporting and dashboard functionality they have
The MicroStrategy platform has allowed us to rapidly
show top management the potential of business
long offered. Self-service analytics empowers business people to
intelligence. In just a few weeks we have been able
take analytics into their own hands, giving them the agility and
to create the first four dashboards that immediately
flexibility to visually explore their data and build out their own
convinced business people both from an efficiency
custom reports and dashboards.
Many BI vendors offer some form of self-service analytics as part of
their solution, but there is a dark side to this type of business-user
driven analytics—data governance, an especially big concern for
and cost point of view.“
Enrica Daolio
Special Project Manager
Global Transaction Banking of
UniCredit (BL TS&TS)
financial institutions. When choosing a BI platform, make sure
that it tightly integrates self-service capabilities with the rest of
the platform; this will significantly reduce both overhead costs
and the regulatory risks associated with bad data.
This app paid itself off on the first day”
Artur de Oliveira Guterres
Head of Information Management
Banco Espirito Santo
microstrategy.com 4
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Conclusion
How does this impact you and your buying decision?
MicroStrategy
Other BI vendors
The MicroStrategy Analytics platform offers a unified architecture
business requirements while minimizing the amount of time
Build reusable components for long-term
Minimize infrastructural rigor for
efficency and
enterprise-wide
that seamlessly
integrates
all ofconsistency
its BI capabilities into a single short-term
spent efficiency
by IT maintaining and administering the deployment.
ecosystem. This means fewer moving parts, tighter product
By reducing the burden on IT and improving business user
integration, and a more efficient overall system. MicroStrategy’s
productivity, MicroStrategy is able to deliver both the industry’s
Developer
Effort architecture is able to meet a broad range of
superior product
lowest TCO and a significant return on investment.
Reusable
metadata
Components
MicroStrategy
Build reusable components for long-term
efficency and enterprise-wide consistency
Effort to develop
Effort to develop
Figure 2: BI capabilities integration.
Developer
Effort
Other BI vendors
Coordination with
previous developments
Minimize infrastructural rigor for
short-term efficiency
Report design
Report components
Developer
Effort
Reusable
metadata
Components
Additional BI applications
Business abstraction
Data abstraction
Developer
Effort
Effort to develop
Effort to develop
Additional BI applications
Reusable
metadata
Components
Coordination with
previous developments
Report design
Report components
Reusable
metadata
Components
Additional BI applications
microstrategy.com
Business abstraction
Data abstraction
Additional BI applications
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