Symrise: Establishing Roles in MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy security and roles are highly flexible and allow you to create a completely bespoke role concept. How should a customer figure out what their roles should look like and what the users should be able to do on the system? In this talk we will explain how we rebuilt our role concept from the ground up and how we came to realize this is our cornerstone.

Over the last year we have re-invented our outdated security roles to something that fits with a modern, open, flexible single version of truth business intelligence platform. In the process of doing this, we realized that the MicroStrategy security roles are more than just a technical expression of what the users can do; they are the cornerstone of opening the platform up, increasing internal customer satisfaction and increasing governance. Having clear roles allows us to enlist the business in maturing a single version of truth, good governance and promoting the use of new features like Hypercards.

Before we started, we wished that we could see how other customers had approached this effort, so we would like to share our approach – we don’t claim this is best practice, but hopefully it will be useful for someone. Amongst other things, we will explain:

• Some background that is relevant for the roles
• The process that we used to figure out the roles
• The ideas and principles we started with
• A high level overview of what the roles can do on the platform
• The expectations that IT has on the roles
• The rollout of the roles
• How the roles enable communication and training
• How the roles help turn the digital decision making flywheel