We were sponsors at MicroStrategy World 2020 last week and it was an eye-opening experience. In his keynote, Michael Saylor discussed why traditional BI has been failing organizations and presented an alternative in the form of HyperIntelligence.
HyperIntelligence
This new technology allows MicroStrategy to enrich any web page consumed via Chrome or Edge with tool-tips that show data cards when a user hovers his mouse over information on the page. For example, a HyperIntelligence user might see a card with product sales details whenever she hovers over a product name in an Office 365 document.
With HyperIntelligence, MicroStrategy has provided an interesting innovation that could be quite effective in use-cases where specific granular information is best delivered contextually while users are working within a web-based application. I was intrigued by this innovation from MicroStrategy and was delighted to finally see a Major Business Intelligence vendor admit that building Dashboards and reports is simply not enough to deliver real insights to users.
For far too long, every Business Intelligence vendor keynote has focused on the latest dashboarding and reporting features while completely ignoring the elephant in the room, the fact that the entire Dashboard Paradigm is broken. It was refreshing to hear Micheal Sayler state plainly that the current approach to BI is woefully inadequate.
Metric Insights
At Metric Insights, we have been huge proponents of an alternative approach to Business Intelligence, one in which meaningful insights are delivered to users without requiring them to sift through a sea of dashboards. This is the reason that our Business Intelligence Portal provides alerting and exception reporting that works across all BI Tools. It is why we allow users to push visualizations into Slack and Microsoft Teams and provide intelligent search that works from both our BI Portal and from within collaboration tools.
I applaud MicroStrategy for focusing attention on the Business Intelligence Elephant in the room and for exploring new approaches to solve persistent BI problems. Hopefully, we’ll start seeing more BI vendors acknowledge that the traditional approach to Business Intelligence is broken. Only by coming to terms with the ways that people actually interact with data, and exploring innovative solutions, can we develop technologies that truly improve users’ lives.
