Foreword

Information is the most important competitive force shaping the business landscape today. Companies that harness information well are more efficient because they manage their resources with less waste. They are more nimble because they can sense what is happening in the market more keenly and quickly. The other major economic factors, land, labor, and capital are important, but after 300 years of the Industrial Age experience, their use has been reduced to commoditized best practices. Companies and products are no longer distinguished by innovative uses of land, labor, or capital. But when you find an organization that creates marketing strategies based on deep customer insight, or manages inventory using predictive analytics, or sets prices dynamically based on fine-grained demand variations, then you have found an organization that is outperforming its competitors. In this new information age, information is king.

The power of information is becoming greater every year. Our digital world is being “instrumented” at an unprecedented level. Computing is everywhere and it is capturing everything—every transaction, every website visit, every image viewed, every product shipped, every container stacked, and every product scanned. Businesses are drowning in opportunities to exploit so much data. They are limited only by the ingenuity of the information professionals whose job it is to tame it and business professionals who consume it.

MicroStrategy technology was created to tackle the biggest challenges in business intelligence, that is, to analyze the largest datasets with the most sophisticated analytics, and to empower the largest business user populations to consume and manipulate it. To this day, MicroStrategy is widely recognized as one of the most powerful analytic technologies available. MicroStrategy technology is like a nuclear power plant generating information energy for millions of business consumers. But like a nuclear power-plant, it is entirely dependent on skilled professionals to run it.

Mr. Moraschi’s excellent book is designed to bring information proficiency to a whole new generation of information producers and business people whose jobs increasingly revolve around information, and not just IT professionals. The brilliance of this book is that it blends both concepts and mechanics into one narrative. Readers learn about the structure and terminology that underlie information engineering, and then learn the mechanics of how to use MicroStrategy to turn that information into insight. At a macro level, this is an important book because it will accelerate information literacy in business professionals. At a personal level, it is important because it can propel people into new and prosperous careers in information.

Mark S. LaRow

Executive Vice President of Products, MicroStrategy