MicroStrategy 9.3 : Visual Insight

Visual Insight is MicroStrategy’s answer to business intelligence tools which look for rapid and easy deployments such as Tableau and Tibco Spotfire; it enables business users with limited IT experience to create and polish off functional dashboards which are compatible with mobile platforms in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks. Visual Insight allows users to begin asking – and answering – questions which they may not have come up with originally by allowing them to take a hands on approach in creating the dashboards.

I felt that having a short article going through some of the new Visual Insight features introduced in version 9.3 would be good since I have noticed many of my visitors are interested in the new capabilities of MicroStrategy’s latest release. I base many of my notes on some personal usage of visual insight (available free to try on MicroStrategy Cloud) and on a video I found on Youtube (it’s also the same video shown to me when I attended MicroStrategy’s partner training day).

Visual Insight’s Strengths and New features

As I have mentioned, Visual Insight is designed and aimed towards business users who wish to perform a quick analysis on their data without requiring any aid from their developers or IT department. The entire platform is operated using drag and drop functionality making it extremely intuitive for users to get started in creating visualisations and dashboards. When dragging objects onto the workspace the visualisations will update and re-render on the fly; this gives the user the ability to perform deep analysis and exploration on their data, allowing them to begin answering questions which would have been difficult to solve previously.

It is also possible to include multiple datasets into the mix allowing the user to perform cross analysis over a more complex data structure which spans across different sources. Furthermore, a user can add more than one visualisation onto the workspace. This gives them the ability to view different data cuts and arrangements without the need to scrolling or switching to different pages.

To aid with analysis MicroStrategy intelligently makes suggestions on the visualisation type based on the data objects the user is currently using. The visualisation selection box contains the range of possible visualisation types and the recommended item is highlighted with a green icon in the top right. This takes into consideration users who are not familiar with data visualisation and gives them a nudge in the right direction to help explore and visualise their data.

In previous versions of Visual Insight, functionality was quite limited and we (at Aiimi) used to describe it as a “quick and dirty” method of visualising unrefined data without the need of implementing complex ETL or employing the use of robust data structures. With MicroStrategy 9.3 things have progressed immensely since and visual insight can be used to create some serious dashboards which can bring true business value on all levels. In addition to the features mentioned already, the user has filtering capabilities which allow them to restrict the view of data and allows them to slice and dice their visualisations in different ways to gain insights on their business. Minimising and maximising various visualisations is also an option, making it possible to focus on one graph/chart at a time. Furthermore, visualisation to visualisation targeting is possible, allowing users to make graphs into selectors which will filter other visualisations accordingly; this paves the way for a much more advanced analysis on data, taking visual insight away from the “quick and dirty” description and making it a real competitor for full solutions such as Tableau and Tibco Spotfire.

Geographical Data and Network Visualisations

One of the focuses of the new Visual Insight was the way in which it can now handle extremely dense geographical data and also the new Network diagrams. In previous versions of Visual Insight, geographical data could only be visualised through the use of markers; this was fine up until the data got too large and certain hotspots of data became extremely crowded. This eventually made it quite difficult to gain any extra insight into the data and it was often hard to tell what was going on due to the busyness of the visualisation. Furthermore, the size of the markers made it more difficult to pinpoint areas accurately as they would obscure each other whenever there were large clusters placed together. To solve this problem MicroStrategy has implemented a density map which uses a colour scheme instead of markers to indicate the density of data. This makes the visualisation much clearer to read and also conveys the message much quicker as the colour scheme (red = dense, blue = sparse) is familiar to most people.

With the network diagram a business user could perform market basket analysis (one example) to analyse which products are most often purchased in conjunction with each other. The data is visualised as data islands with lines representing the joins between each item (the thicker the line the stronger the link). Using this visualisation with visual insight’s filtering capabilities (to further refine the view of data) a user can perform extremely advanced analysis on their business which would not have been possible through the use of bar charts and line graphs.

These are just a few examples of the functionality found in MicroStrategy Visual Insight 9.3. I recommend anyone who wishes to find out more to sign up to Cloud Personal on the MicroStrategy website (free) and begin using Visual Insight to see first-hand just how easy and simple it is. There are also numerous videos on Youtube which give a much more detailed and complete account of the new features found in 9.3.

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