Microsoft under the leadership of Satya Nadella has brought in fresh make over of Microsoft, and when it comes to Business Intelligence, the changes brought about under the leadership of James Phillips needs to be specially mentioned. Business intelligence (BI) delivers critical performance analytics and insights to workers, empowering them to make faster and better business decisions. However, enterprise-wide penetration of BI is still surprisingly low. This is partially due to the misperceptions that business intelligence is costly, difficult to use and deploy, and slow to deliver real business value. “Self-service BI” is shattering these perceptions. It delivers low-cost, rapidly deployed decision-support, enabling any worker, regardless of job role, geographic location or department, to work from a reliable and up-to-date set of data, presented in a context and detail level relevant to job role and appropriate to data access privileges. This definition serves as a useful discussion point to highlight how Power BI can help your organisation to achieve the objectives of self-service BI and realise its benefits.
Clearly, Power BI will let you do nearly everything that you can do using the traditional SQL Server BI toolkit. Power Query queries extend the scope of the data sources further to include Azure data services, OData feeds, web pages, web services, and SaaS applications. You can design, build, and deploy self-service BI solutions by creating Power BI reports from datasets, connecting to tabular models.
Microsoft has built a brand new HTML 5 compliant visualisation engine that is simply awesome. Everything (virtually everything) will slice and dice and cross filter everything else. Anyone that can create a chart in Excel can create a chart in Power BI (and probably some people that can’t create a chart in Excel too for that matter). You don’t need a specialised IT report writer to create every new report for the business.
Making data more comprehensible: Power BI users can create custom visuals and use them in dashboards and reports. The number of visualizations is growing, however currently, visualizations include:To streamline the experience even further, users can inquire the data and build visualisations from the results by using the natural language capability and just typing questions.
Because users can get up to speed quickly and require little to no training, support costs with self-service BI are significantly lower than they are with more complex BI solutions. If you implement SaaS-based self-service BI, you can also recover direct server investments and evolving maintenance costs with a convenient monthly subscription. Also, self-service BI platforms scale seamlessly so that as adoption increases, additional server capability can be added without disrupting access or requiring significant IT resources. In marked contrast to traditional enterprise BI solutions, self-service BI tools don’t require either a data warehouse or the associated database licensing costs. This alone cuts down months if not years off of BI project timelines and it eliminates sizable expense. Power BI is free to try and indeed free to use as long as you want. If you want to take advantage of more of the enterprise features including controlled sharing of data, automatic refreshes using gateways etc. then you have to pay – wait for it – a whole US$9.99 per month per user. It is enough to give the competition a run for their money!
Power BI is offered in three different plans, with a cost sheet showing the high-level features of each plan here, so you can decide which option works best for your organization.
The Power BI service is on a continuous release cycle. As improvements are made they are released into the cloud service. You can experience parallel improvements to the mobile apps and to Power BI Desktop. The pace of their release cycles s still incredible. Quite literally, today’s biggest complaint can disappear when you wake up tomorrow morning.
NRoot Labs has tremendous experience and has the resources to architect and deploy comprehensive BI solutions with Microsoft’s technology stack on-premise or in the cloud. Contact us to learn how you can integrate Power BI into your overall BI strategy.
Around the globe, companies must cut costs and reduce risks as they face undemanding sales,reluctant suppliers, and tighter credit. In addition, restrained credit can affect the entire supply chain, causing delays or limiting availability to key raw materials. It’s vital to have contingency plans for handling the potential impact of constrained trade. But with challenges come opportunities – opportunities from Business Intelligence. To justify BI, decision makers need to look at the big picture advantages.
BI compiles a company’s most essential data so employees can focus on answering crucial questions. Access to data allows for fast decision making and an edge over the competition. Let us address how BI can help you reduce costs, make smarter operational decisions, and help your business thrive within an uncertain economy.
In good times, when revenue and margins are high, business leaders seldom ask if they can squeeze more out. Their perspectives change when the economy falters. This is when instances of poor decision-making comes to light.
Bottom line vs. top line: When professionals have access to the information they need, they’re able to focus on improving their work, rather than getting distracted by insignificant tasks. Taking a data-driven approach also opens up opportunities for new incentives by rewarding how employees improve the bottom line beyond expectations. In highly competitive positions such as sales, recognizing performance data this way lets top talent set goals for their maximum potential. BI thus helps empowering the employees and thus improves the bottom line.It’s been shown that top-down change is only essential for companies during critical moments, while bottom-up change brings long-term improvements. With BI solutions, the company is guided by the bottom line keeping the top line in focus. As data is entered into the system, dashboards across different roles depend on the information needed while employees are connected by the same results. In some organizations, without centralized reporting, this leads to decisions made on false assumptions. Instead, through BI, everyone shares a single source of truth. Thus helping the change occur from the bottom up, rather than top down.
To win, survive, or grow in today’s market, businesses need discipline and execution. BI is capable of providing solid forecasting that takes into account the operational model and how it relates to the economic environment. It helps business units have fast, efficient and agile reactions when a problem occurs.
Turn on a dime: Disruption is often unpredictable. When a market shifts and a business comes across a road block, BI makes it easy to sail in a new direction. Data is selected and displayed based on the organization’s strengths, highlighting opportunities for additional revenue. With BI’s far-reaching effects, everyone within the organization can be prepared to make an impact where it’s needed. BI thus helps business units react faster and efficiently when challenges arise. Find profitable customers/channels: Data improves conversations by focusing on facts rather than subjective experiences. It’s imperative to have data that supports every argument. If decision makers are discussing something that may deeply affect the company, the outcome shouldn’t depend on subjective experience or a single event. Instead, to make important decisions, there must be data available that keeps everyone focused on the reality of the business, not just the perspective of executives. BI helps you analyze customer profitability, so you can allocate your limited resources on those customers that are profitable now and cultivate those customers who are most likely to grow your sales when the economy recovers. Get real-time information to the right employees: With access to information, your company stake holders can quickly analyze what’s happening within the business today and make decisions based on information that’s both current and relevant. With a nuanced and reliable BI reporting tool, stakeholders can rest easy knowing the business is planning for long-term success. The most common problem in several companies is that people on the frontline do not receive information, even though they make the most decisions. And yet individuals who make the fewest decisions, albeit the strategic ones, have the most access to information. With BI, stakeholders can have direct access to the data that’s driving the company’s decisions to easily get on board with them.The bottom line is, Business Intelligence solutions combine the best value, pervasive deployment, and complete integration. To reap the full performance enhancing benefits of BI, you need a solution that is easy to use and makes your stakeholders smarter. Business Intelligence doesn’t need to be so complex that it shuts out regular business users. Nor does it need to eat up IT resources. The key is to find the right BI implementation partner to help you thrive.
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