Traditional business intelligence typically involves using historical data for deriving current performance insights. Many businesses today benefit from analyzing this intelligence for making predictions about future business operations. There are three components of business intelligence: predictive analysis, diagnostic analysis, and reporting. It is important for an organization to focus on the predictive analysis to gain competitive advantage and to better understand customers’ needs. To extract the value of the predictive analysis, companies can utilize analysis & visualization tools to model & consolidate data. Power BI desktop serves as the low barrier business intelligence tool operating in the realm of self-service business intelligence.
Power BI is a data analysis & visualization tool, which transforms and models data as a dashboard or a report. This business analytics product enables organizations to gather real-time insights into the data. Having access to real-time data visualizations enables businesses to use predictive analysis to uncover future opportunities & better understand customers’ needs.
Below, we’ve mentioned the most significant features that show why we should be analyzing and visualizing data with Power BI.
Sharing & Collaborating
Power BI comes with a desktop and cloud-based interface for sharing & collaboration. Power BI services that connect with SharePoint or other cloud-based groups can seamlessly integrate into your organization’s existing environment. Underlying datasets and full reports can be easily shared; this enables users to create or modify their own visualizations based on their department’s needs. You can add your collections of individual visuals or full report pages to the dashboards to provide reporting and analysis at a glance, view report performance relevant to a particular business process or customize your own. One can configure these dashboards with data-driven alerts that can be customized as per user’s requirements. Moreover, pinning live pages to the dashboard enables end viewers to interact with reports through filtering capabilities.
Data Refresh & Live Data Connections
Power BI features several techniques that ensure your reports & dashboards are displaying up to date information. Usually, when a data is imported into Power BI desktop, a copy of that data is created within the program. To avoid importing a copy of that data, you can connect using Direct Query; this will query the underlying data source. When you use a gateway connection, your data is automatically refreshed each time the report is opened, or it can be refreshed at a predetermined time intervals. These data refreshes can also be scheduled to coincide with your daily report/dashboard viewing needs. Power BI also enables you to live-stream data for real-time reporting. You can either push the data into the Power BI service or it can be streamed into a temporary cache for use by streaming visuals. With real-time data streaming, your reports & dashboard visualizations updates occur right in front of your eyes!
Power BI Mobile
Power BI mobile app comes with Power BI, which enables users to always access all visualizations & dashboards available in the Power BI service. Executives, sales representatives, or other employees who travel frequently will be informed of the business operations and the remote access to will allow them to update information prior to their meetings. Wherever geospatial visualizations are used in the Power BI service, Power BI mobile app will use location services to zoom in & display data points within the user’s physical vicinity.
Final Thoughts
Power BI is a great self-service business intelligence tool for any business that wants to increase its analytics & visualization capabilities. This tool puts data in employees’ hands, giving them access to information they need to work effectively & efficiently. Professional consultants can help you develop an effective data model and establish back-end needs for live-data connections that will support consistency & accuracy of your underlying reporting. They will develop access controls & role-based security to manage data governance best practices. These professionals will also develop visualizations & dashboards by working with business users across departments to identify & incorporate their needs. With proper implementation & support, Power BI will enable users to open the gates of data access by giving them the ability to utilize valuable data assets.
