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Cindi Howson's BI Scorecard
Cindi Howson is the founder of BIScorecard, a Web site for in-depth BI product reviews. She has been using, implementing and evaluating business intelligence tools for more than 15 years. She is the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App and Business Objects XI R2: The Complete Reference. She teaches for The Datawarehousing Institute (TDWI) and is a frequent speaker at industry events. See More by Cindi Howson MicroStrategy and the BI Breadth vs. Depth Debate
While much of the BI market has been busy expanding its solution breadth – acquiring or developing performance management capabilities – one vendor that has stayed focus exclusively on the BI front-end has been MicroStrategy. Only time will tell if its strategy will pay off, but CEO Michael Saylor has long maintained that there is still a lot of work to be done in the traditional BI space, to solve some of the harder BI problems. One of those hard problems is impact analysis and regression testing. When someone makes a change any where in the BI lifecycle, say a physical field in the data warehouse, identifying affected reports is often guesswork. A handful of BI vendors do "okay" in telling you which reports are impacted (see BIScorecard, architecture criteria for detailed scores); for most others, the reports will out and out break. At MicroStrategy's Symposium in New York this week, the vendor previewed Integrity Manager, due for release in September. Integrity Manager goes beyond simple impact analysis, providing full regression testing for any number of potential system changes (operating system change, VLDB settings, metric calculations, data warehouse load errors, and so on). Integrity Manager will do before-and-after report comparisons to tell an administrator the impact of the change, warning if there are differences in the data values, if the SQL generated is different, if the output format is affected. Not only will Integrity Manager tell you that there is a difference, it also highlights the differences in the numeric values, SQL, or display. I have not seen anything near this capability in other leading BI suites. It's one of those details that few business users will get excited about, and yet one that can be a hot button for BI administrators. Integrity Manager can help these BI administrators know in advance which users and reports will be affected, and it can forewarn them when a change outside their area of control impacts BI. As BI increasingly becomes an enterprise (vs. departmental) resource, such integrity checking and proactive alerting is important. Today, most BI administrators are left with either no testing or tedious, manual tests. MicroStrategy is definitely ahead of the market in this capability, showing that what it may not have in terms of breadth, it more than makes up for in BI depth.
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