Advancing the Analytic Edge in the Department of Defense

How modern analytics empowers Department of Defense organizations

Across the Federal Government, staff processes are plagued by a lack of automation, integration, and visualization required to effectively inform Senior Leaders. These processes often rely on manual inputs and transmission which undermine the promise of digital transformation while ensuring few can make decisions with trusted data. The stakes are high. Organizations risk being irrelevant in an accelerating world if they cannot overcome decades of accumulated technical debt, adapt their staff processes, upskill workforces, and understand their data. Unfortunately, many organizations still manage their data on spreadsheets that are pasted onto PowerPoint slides and either printed projected on a screen, or embedded in a SharePoint web page.

Why is this? Partly because industry products that blur the lines between data preparation, visualization, and storage create challenges for organizations that need solutions to meet today’s data requirements while being flexible enough to adapt to future needs. A “one solution fits all” approach in which one commercial off-the-shelf software product attempts to solve every business and mission related problem risks the creation of a single point of failure. Further, this approach conflicts with the current state of technology where software components are connected as individual services within a larger ecosystem.

Mobile Device Dashboard

480

Hours saved,annually through automation

Retire Legacy System

$500K

Annual Cost Savings

Predictive Dashboard

26

Weeks saved

2019 CCRI Dashboard

98%

Predictive Accuracy

EEO Dashboard

240

Hours saved annually through automation

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A focus on interoperability and adoption of products that complement each other enables organizations to implement enterprise solutions that offer options and reduce risk. An analytics solution for data automation should exhibit the following features:

  • Compatibility: individual components should interoperate within the overall solution, as well as with existing data, tools, and processes.
  • Loose Coupling: components should follow open standards and be interchangeable to maximize flexibility in meeting future requirements and minimize the risk of vendor lock-in.
  • Best-of-breed: components should be selected based on their ability to provide the best functionality within their respective domain (e.g., data preparation, visualization, geospatial, data science), rather than providing average capability across many domains.

The Northstrat/MicroStrategy Solution

Northstrat and MicroStrategy team to provide a comprehensive analytic solution tailor made for Federal organizations that want to modernize staff processes, provide trusted data to every user, and increase the use of data to make better and faster decisions.

Our technical expertise in engineering and user centric design combined with deep experience improving, automating, and modernizing business processes reduce risk in acquisitions and ensure the successful deployment of data analytics solutions. Leveraging MicroStrategy’s #1 rated business intelligence platform, we provide the most open, flexible, and secure software to conform to an agency’s technology environment while integrating with existing tools in a Federated Analytics concept. Federated analytics allows users to continue working in other popular tools like Qlik, Power BI, Excel, and Tableau while accessing MicroStrategy’s centralized semantic layer for governed and secure data. This approach minimizes change and increases user adoption of analytics.

Business Value

Northstrat and MicroStrategy have provided data analytic capabilities to the Government for several years using a mix of the appropriate tools and skills while designing the best solutions for our customers.
 

The value of our analytics solutions is measured by: increased resources available for missions; time savings or cost avoidance through automation of reporting capabilities and notifications; increased data transparency; and enabling deeper analysis and data utilization.

Our team measures its success in time saved or costs avoided by the customer, while allowing limited resources to focus on higher priority mission critical tasks. We accomplish these savings for customers in the following ways:
 

  • Automation of reporting and notifications
  • Increased transparency to make data visible to a wider audience at any time
  • Improving the frequency and automation of data updates/refreshes
  • Increasing data utilization through improved data quality (Accuracy, Completeness, and Timeliness)
  • Reducing the duplication of data sources under the mantra “enter less, use more”.

Achieving the promise of digital transformation is possible with a sound approach and the right mix of skills and experience. If you’d like to see how Northstrat and MicroStrategy can empower your agency, schedule a virtual demonstration by emailing Lisa Durant (lisa.durant@northstrat.com) or Roger Crombie (rcrombie@microstategy.com).

About Us

Northstrat, Incorporated is a dynamic small business specializing in delivering outstanding technical solutions. While our experience spans many technologies and capabilities, our core competencies are Agile Software Development, System Engineering, Intelligence Mission Systems, IT Systems & Data Engineering, and Business Intelligence & Analytics. 

Northstrat delivers mission critical solutions to the Intelligence Community (IC), Department of Defense (DoD), and the Department of Justice (DoJ). Over 90% of Northstrat staff hold Top Secret or higher clearances and they maintain all necessary certifications related to security and information assurance requirements to support our customers (e.g., DoD Directive 8570). 

As a services company, Northstrat is committed to transforming customer problems into solutions. With an acute focus on customers’ missions, Northstrat is experienced with DoD processes, and will be able to quickly analyze the business processes, pain points and requirements to develop capabilities with the speed and scale to be fielded in the most timely and effective manner possible.

MicroStrategy has provided business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services to private and public sector customers for over 30 years. 

Government agencies like Army Combat Readiness Center, Naval Exchange, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, United States Postal Service, The Federal Bureau of Investigations, and the Department of Health and Human Services rely on MicroStrategy’s open, modern, and enterprise analytics platform. MicroStrategy delivers an out-of-the-box enterprise-level platform to meet the full range of data governance, security, and analytic requirements while delivering unmatched performance at scale. 

The platform’s open architecture supports the integration of advanced data science tools and complementary technology stack components while allowing deployment in any environment. In 2020 and 2021, MicroStrategy was rated the #1 Enterprise Analytics platform in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities Report and is the highest rated platform for Portfolio Capabilities in BARC’s “The BI Survey 2021”.