Microsoft Power BI: an entire tour through the ultimate BI Tool
Power BI is a Microsoft business analysis platform, launched in 2015. The launch of ecosystem services and data refinement applications has ushered in a new era in Market Intelligence.
The launch of ecosystem services and data refinement applications has ushered in a new era in Market Intelligence. That’s where Business Intelligence tools (or just BI tools), like Microsoft Power BI come in, one of the main consoles of integrated data analytics solutions on the market.
There’s no doubt that data is a fundamental part of business development. Every digital activity generates a data trail. And if it’s on the Internet, you know somebody’s been collecting data about it.
Companies saw the opportunity to cross-reference data from different daily journeys – locomotion, food, information, etc. – to get to know their consumers better, anticipate desires and give them that little push at the time of purchase, offering the right products and services at the right time.
To support this new economy, IT companies quickly provided a range of solutions that allow them to organize, separate, and qualify this data to produce business intelligence. All this in the most automated way possible.
It was the twilight of market intelligence tools like Microsoft Power BI. It has now become widely used around the world and a precursor of a new era in Business Intelligence. Say goodbye to spreadsheets.
What is Microsoft Power BI and why use it?
Business intelligence (BI) tools are types of application software that collect and process large amounts of unstructured data from internal and external systems, including books, journals, documents, health records, images, files, email, video, and other business sources.
While not as flexible as business analytics tools, BI tools collect data to help users find information through queries. These tools also prep data for analysis, allowing you to create reports, dashboards, and data visualizations.
The results give both employees and managers the power to accelerate and improve decision making, increase operational efficiency, pinpoint new revenue potentials, identify market trends, report genuine KPIs, and identify new business opportunities.
Typically used for more straightforward research and reporting, BI tools can combine a broad set of data analysis applications including ad hoc analysis and querying, enterprise reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), mobile BI, real-time BI, operational BI, cloud and SaaS BI, open-source BI, collaborative BI, and location intelligence.
They usually also include data visualization software, as well as tools for building BI dashboards and performance scorecards that display business metrics and KPIs to bring company data to life in easy-to-understand visuals.
Microsoft Power BI is a market intelligence tool hosted on Azure, which is part of the so-called self-service BI solutions, types of cross-platform tools with countless integrations that accelerate business decisions.
Before this type of tool existed, analysts needed to rely on programs like excel spreadsheets, and a lot of them.
With the data explosion and the Big Data market trend, human processing power has become too slow to ensure competitive advantages – not to mention error-prone.
Self-service BI tools emerged to provide autonomy, allowing companies to find answers quickly without resorting to using more manpower, resources, or external sources, accelerating analysis and streamlining the decision-making process.
There are two great benefits to Power BI tool:
• Centralizing data from different sources in an automated way;
• As well as data visualization, graphs, and monitoring.
Power BI is compatible with more than 60 applications, including Google Analytics, MailChimp, Salesforce, Office Package (Excel lovers won’t be left behind), Git, Virtual Studio, and much more.
Check out what you can do with Microsoft Power BI and its application ecosystem:
• Identify patterns and trends in data.
• Create simulations and projections by manipulating variables.
• Integrate data from different sources.
• Create visual and interactive dashboards.
• Segment customers based on purchasing behavior.
• Map client lifetime and activations.
• Web (SaaS), desktop, and mobile (iOs and Android) compatibility.
Automate workflows.
• Create no-code chatbots for customer interaction.
The benefits?
- Acceleration in the decision making process;
- Decreased error rate;
- Reduction in data integration and analysis time;
- Decreased cost and effort spent on mechanical tasks;
- Greater security in handling large amounts of data.
Data visualization: the end of guesswork
In addition to data integration, the Microsoft Power BI tool has arrived to help decision-makers overcome another challenge in relation to data: graphs and indicators that are intelligible to most company employees.
The success of a company is directly related to the number of right decisions that its leaders (and non-leaders) make. Even with fine-tuned data processing, the product will not always be “data-friendly” for professionals in other areas (after all, not everyone is a data scientist).
This data will (or should) inform the decisions of many key people within the organization. And you can’t risk making mistakes in strategic decisions just because the data is difficult to understand. This information needs to be made more accessible.
Data visualization is the brainchild of data scientists and designers. It’s made to represent information graphically, in a more intuitive way.
With integrated, interactive dashboards that ditch representing data with formulas or code, Microsoft Power BI has become an icon of data visibility, usability, and transparency, contributing to the consolidation of an analytical culture within teams and organizations.
Microsoft Power BI: the last frontier of Market Intelligence
Tools like Power BI are automating analysis, making data easier to understand, and fostering an analytical culture in the business environment.
In the near future, every professional will need to compare data and analyze performance graphs to support decisions in their respective areas, however small they may be. Despite analytical thinking being a skill that should be developed by all employees, not everyone is quite there yet.
It’s important to provide the necessary tools to enable employees to understand the minimum necessary information to support their decision-making.
Analyzing data is fundamental to understanding any business. But to scale the analytics culture, you need to make data insights accessible to everyone.
A more intuitive view generates efficiency in decision making, reduces errors, and enables employees to understand the value that data can generate for the company.
Microsoft Power BI allows scaling business intelligence, empowering areas of Business Intelligence, and enabling easy integration of data from different sources into visual and organized dashboards.
As you can see, use a cutting-edge BI tool can provide you with some of the best insights you can extract from you business numbers. It’s time to leave spreadsheets behind and reach the next level of business intelligence.
