The Value of Power BI

Many of our customers ask us about the business value of Power BI. No one wants to be razzle-dazzled with software that does not deliver significant value. This month’s blog offers a number of compelling reasons to consider Power BI as your data visualization tool.

1. Go Directly to Visualizations.  Once you’ve discovered that scrolling through columns and rows of numbers isn’t offering you all the insights that your data offers, you see the need for good visualizations. Power BI can create summarizations of our data without the immediate need to write formulae. We go directly to the creation of visualizations and begin our analysis there.

2. Dashboards. A good dashboard can tell us more at a glance than hundreds of rows of data ever could. Dashboards are interactive and viewed in a web browser. This means that dashboards may be utilized on mobile smart devices, as well as traditional laptops and workstations. This is key for senior management when up-to-date information is required for making critical decisions.

3. Access to Time-Sensitive Data. Sales personnel want to spot new opportunities. Operational managers want to detect problems before they occur. Social media constantly provides new information for making decisions. As data is moved through Power BI, this information is quickly surfaced on a dashboard.

4. Extensible through AppSource. Let’s face it, if you were happy with pie charts, you’d still be using Excel. Power BI Desktop allows for the fast installation of even more visualizations from the AppSource store. Many of them are free, while some have a nominal cost. The ability to add third-party visualizations not only removes the need for custom programming, it may very well propel Power BI past its competitors.

5. Unify Self-Service Tools with Existing Data Stores. Users store data in Excel and want it in Power BI. Integration is quite tight. Model that data with your SQL tables, and now you really have something. IT maintains data on its servers, and end-users access it safely and use it to enhance their own analysis.

6. Collaboration with Colleagues. When multiple users must offer input to a report, the browser-based version of Power BI makes this simple. Multiple users may assist in report design, and each user can see their colleagues’ contributions to the report in real-time. This significantly decreases the amount of time needed to produce a report. No need to email information back-and-forth or create multiple versions of a report that must be evaluated by other team members. A report may be built once, correctly, the first time.

7. Cortana Integration.  Users may verbally ask questions in their native language and see answers! This seems too magical to be true, but voice technology has come a long way, and the feature works quite well. Senior management with limited computer skills may utilize this from their mobile devices.

8. Q&A. If that last reason seemed a bit too hard to believe (It does work!), you can always use natural language questions and answers. This feature allows users to enter questions like, “What is the total profit for the consumer market segment in the second quarter of this year?”

This approach is far superior to the way that most users must approach a search engine. Their attempts often follow the pattern, “What-keywords-should-I-guess-at-today-that-worked-yesterday-but-may-not-work-now?” Yeah, we’re all getting really tired of that too.

Natural question and answer is the way to go, and users with limited search engine experience greatly appreciate this feature.

9. Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). Every enterprise has a group of hard-core Excel users who are quite good at creating complex formulae. These formulae sometimes rival what IT personnel can do. DAX allows formula writers to access data in all the tables in a data model to perform sophisticated analysis. There are functions in DAX that go far beyond what’s possible using Excel worksheet functions.

If all of this seems like a big step forward for your analysts, it is. Need some guidance? Reach out to us at Intellezy. We have an experienced change management team that knows how to make this happen in a way that offers confidence in the results.