City of Austin Enhances Financial and Operational Efficiency with MicroStrategy BI Solution
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- MicroStrategy
- Visual Insight
- MicroStrategy Mobile
Tech Stack
- Business Intelligence (BI)
- Data Visualization
- Mobile BI
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
- Employee Satisfaction
- Innovation Output
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Applicable Industries
- Cities & Municipalities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- Training
About The Customer
The City of Austin, known as the Live Music Capital of the World, is the seat of Texas state government and home to the University of Texas. With a fast-growing population of about 800,000, it is the 11th most populous city in the United States. Austin is a community of unparalleled creativity and progressivism, making it a technologically savvy city with a focus on cost-effective innovation. The city’s Financial Services Department is responsible for managing the city’s financial operations, including budgeting, capital expenditure, and finance applications. The department aims to foster visibility and efficiency through highly intuitive ad hoc reporting and a unified business intelligence platform.
The Challenge
In 2012, the City of Austin’s Financial Services Department received national recognition for an integrated financial portal that provided citizens and staff access to detailed information about the city’s financial operations. Despite this, internal users struggled to access the data they needed. The city’s databases consisted of a combination of home-grown ERP systems and other custom applications, making the process of integrating data for ad hoc reporting extremely time-consuming. This redundancy in user requests for similar types of reports caused the IT department to shift their focus from systems management to answering specific user questions. Every departmental group was attempting to do BI on their own, which was costly from both a maintenance and service perspective. The City of Austin decided it was necessary to look into purchasing an existing off-the-shelf analytics platform.
The Solution
The City of Austin’s financial department began the rigorous process of procuring a new BI solution with a corporate-wide vision in mind. After bringing together key players from each departmental group, the city determined its critical BI requirements to be ease of use for business users, ease of deployment, and holistic functionality. They chose MicroStrategy for its organically grown architecture, which required little to no back-end development and fewer resources. With MicroStrategy, the City of Austin has a standard reporting platform providing citywide data integrity as all reports are created accessing the same data sets and definitions. Through the use of MicroStrategy’s visual data discovery tool, Visual Insight, the organization has been able to push ad hoc reporting down into the workforce. Users are now empowered to quickly and easily satisfy their own reporting needs, freeing the IT department to focus on more value-added work. The city is also experimenting with MicroStrategy Mobile functionality in the field to collect code compliance infraction data on properties.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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