Business Intelligence

‍Becoming data informed is a key step in an organization’s digital transformation. When data is transformed into insights, and these insights become the foundation that informs decision making, organizations are in a better position to be strategic and operate at their full potential. A significant hurdle to this transformation is the ability for a company to take their collection of data, turn it into meaningful insights, and make them readily available to those stakeholders that need them.

“Business Intelligence” says Microsoft “uncovers insights for making strategic decisions. Business intelligence tools analyze historical and current data and present findings in intuitive visual formats.” These intuitive visuals created from business intelligence tools can be delivered quickly, allowing business leaders to react fast and make impactful decisions. Business Intelligence tools also help a company look into the future by performing a predictive analysis. Historical data is used to predict what will most likely happen in the coming quarters and years, allowing leaders to prepare and plan for the future.

The Power of Power BI

‍One of the potential data visualization tools that a company can use to gain deeper data insight is Microsoft Power BI. Power BI takes a company’s data, leverages built-in AI and machine learning, and allows the user to quickly create data visualizations that are interactable and easy to share. These visualizations can be utilized to better understand a business' internal data and gain insights into the company’s failures and successes!

An important feature of Power BI is its ability to create dashboards and share reports. The data visualizations created in Power BI can be grouped into easily viewable and organized dashboards. These dashboards can be shared in a variety of ways designed to best fit into an organization's workflow. Dashboards can be viewed on a web browser, through the desktop app, or through the Power BI mobile app. Interactive data visualizations and dashboards can be integrated into websites and PowerPoint presentations or exported as PDFs and images. Learn more about creating reports and dashboards in Power BI.

Power BI uses AI and machine learning to take your data and create “AI Insights”, which are pre-trained machine learning models that help with data preparation and creation of graphics. One example of AI in Power BI is called a Q&A visual. Creating a Q&A visual in a dashboard allows the user to ask questions about the data and get answers back in real time with no data analysis needed. If you were to ask the Q&A visual “Which product generated the highest revenue in 2021?”, Power BI would calculate an answer and also show a relevant graphic comparing all the product revenues in 2021. The use of AI helps identify key metrics more quickly and also makes reports feel much more interactive to the user. 

One of Power BI’s biggest strengths is its ability to handle and manipulate data. Power BI can import different sources of data, multiple files, databases, and also has pre-built integrations for Salesforce, Google Analytics, Azure, QuickBooks and many other platforms.  This allows many different data sets to be imported into the project, after which that data can be cleaned up and transformed in the Power Query editor. An important note about Power Query is that when working in it, the data files are never manipulated which means that the source data will never be corrupted and changes are easily reversible. Updating data files can oftentimes be a large choke point while creating updated visualizations, but as the data sources update in Power BI, it will automatically update the reports and dashboards.

The Dura Digital Takeaway

‍The commitment and effort required to become a data informed organization, as part of a digital transformation journey, can be intimidating. Microsoft Power BI could be a viable option for your organization because:

• Power BI can turn any set of data into easy-to-understand visualizations;
• Power BI reports can be shared in many ways to best fit an organization's workflow;
• Power BI uses AI to quickly identify key metrics, utilize image recognition, text analytics, and create machine learning models;
• Power BI can combine data from many sources and it is a great data editor.

Dura Digital understands how Microsoft Power BI can be used to revolutionize the way you handle data and data visualization. Contact us to start generating meaningful insights to help move your organization forward.