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Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture is a methodology for integrating and standardizing infrastructure (IT software, hardware and services) across autonomous business units. The purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to align organizational strategy, business processes, Information technology hardware and software, and IT spending.
The planned structure document for an Enterprise Architecture solution is defined in an Enterprise Architecture Framework (also known as Architecture Framework). This framework contains any required design documents (e.g. data models, dashboard specifications), business models (e.g. organizational charts), covers multiple perspectives of the enterprise (application tier/perspective, information tier/perspective, technology perspective), and defines the required enterprise architecture output activities also known as Artifacts.
Why is Enterprise Architecture important?
By standardizing on IT infrastructure, organizations are able to:
- Share resources and development across previously disparate IT systems and investments
- Share user populations, data access and analytics
- Deliver a single-version-of-the-truth to all business users, IT professionals, and executives across the organization and beyond to customers, prospects and partners.
- Synchronize multi-function and cross-department IT investments
- Develop long-term IT investments that embrace extensibility and maintainability
- Welcome project growth as the number and usage of applications increase
- Encourage and easily adapt to expanding data volumes and user numbers
MicroStrategy's Philosophy – Delivering an Architecture for the Long Term
MicroStrategy was designed to usher in a new era in business intelligence, with an architecture that is organically integrated and expressly designed for Enterprise Business Intelligence. All components of MicroStrategy’s architecture are the result of organic growth from a single architectural baseline. The “integrated BI architectures” from other vendors are not organic, but are the result of integrating proprietary BI technologies.
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| MicroStrategy’s organically integrated architecture was specifically designed to usher in a new era of enterprise business intelligence, and help enterprises evolve from previous eras of islands of disparate BI technologies and inconsistent departmental BI applications. |
Era 1: Isolated Departmental Islands of BI Are an Initial Success
Throughout the 1990s, most companies deployed BI applications as departmental solutions, and accumulated a large collection of disparate BI technologies as a result. Each distinct technology supported a specific user population and database, within a well-defined “island of BI.” At first, these islands of BI satisfied the initial needs of the business, but early success in departmental deployment sowed the seeds for new problems as the applications grew.
Era 2: Overlapping Disparate Islands of BI Have Become an Enterprise Liability
Successful applications always expand. The second era of BI is hallmarked by BI applications that have expanded to the point where they are no longer isolated islands. Instead, they overlap in user populations, data access, and analytic coverage. As a result, CIOs are now faced with an untenable situation. The enterprise is getting conflicting versions of the truth through the multiple disparate BI systems, and there is no way to harmonize them without an extraordinary ongoing manual effort of synchronization. Equally problematic is the fact that business users are forced to use many different BI tools depending on what data they want.
Era 3: Enterprise BI Standardization Delivers a Single Version of the Truth with Lowest Total Cost of Ownership
The new era of business intelligence is one where a single BI architecture delivers one version of the truth through a single user interface to all people across the enterprise. It can access all of the data, administer all of the people, eliminate repetitive data access, reduce the administrative effort, and reduce the time to deploy new BI applications. This is not just a vision of Enterprise Business Intelligence. Many companies are successfully achieving this new era of business intelligence with MicroStrategy technology.
The bedrock of MicroStrategy’s architecture philosophy is to deliver a living architecture—one that can continually evolve to greater functionality, greater scalability, with seamless integration, and ever greater economies of scale. Adhering to this basic philosophy often entails making difficult technical choices where the tradeoff is between expediency (building something quickly just to satisfy the immediate market requirement) vs. long-term flexibility (designing something with primary emphasis on extensibility and maintainability over time).
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - Integrated Backplane
MicroStrategy delivers the only unified enterprise architecture, providing the full range of BI functionality with the highest data and user scalability. The integrated backplane is the heart of the MicroStrategy enterprise architecture. It provides the common services of metadata, prompt generation, scheduling, shared caching, security, user management, query generation, query governing, and administration. More importantly, it is the core engine which supports each of the 5 Styles of BI as plug-and-play “service modules” that can be mixed and matched in any combination. These modules include MicroStrategy Report Services for Pixel Perfect™ reporting, dashboards and scorecards, MicroStrategy OLAP Services for speed-of-thought slicing and dicing, and MicroStrategy Narrowcast Services for alerting proactive notification functionality. ROLAP and advanced analytics are always an integral part of the core engine.