Why are we talking about Power BI?

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is a term that refers to the use of software and methods to collect, analyze, and present data from various sources to support decision-making and improve performance in an organization. BI can help businesses gain insights into their current situation, identify trends and opportunities, and optimize their processes and strategies.

One way to understand BI is to break it down into three components: data, analytics, and reporting.

Data is the raw material that BI works with. It can come from internal systems, such as sales, inventory, or customer relationship management (CRM), or from external sources, such as market research, social media, or third-party vendors. Data needs to be organized and stored in a way that makes it accessible and reliable for analysis. This is often done using data warehouses, which are centralized repositories of data that can be queried and processed by BI tools.

Analytics is the process of applying various techniques and algorithms to data to discover patterns, relationships, and insights. Analytics can be descriptive, which answers the question of what happened, diagnostic, which answers the question of why it happened, predictive, which answers the question of what will happen, or prescriptive, which answers the question of what should happen. Analytics can also use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of data analysis.

Reporting is the process of communicating the results of analytics to the relevant stakeholders and decision-makers. Reporting can take various forms, such as dashboards, charts, graphs, tables, or narratives. Reporting can also be interactive, allowing users to explore and manipulate data, or automated, delivering timely and relevant information to users. Reporting aims to provide clear, concise, and actionable information that can help businesses achieve their goals and solve their problems.

BI is not a static or one-time process, but a dynamic and continuous one that adapts to the changing needs and challenges of a business. BI can help businesses gain a competitive edge, increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and enhance innovation. BI can also empower business users to become more self-reliant and data-driven, reducing the dependency on IT and increasing the agility and responsiveness of the organization.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a platform that enables you to connect, visualize, and share data with others. It is a product of Microsoft that has been recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for 14 consecutive years. Power BI offers a range of features and benefits, such as:

• Integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, allowing you to access and collaborate on data insights within your familiar productivity tools.

• Hundreds of built-in connectors with Power Query, enabling you to easily connect to data sources from various cloud and on-premises systems.

• A combination of Power BI and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, providing you with a scalable and secure solution for building and managing systems of intelligence.

• A seamless connection with Microsoft Power Platform, empowering you to go from insight to action with Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.

• Data protection and governance with Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security, ensuring that your data is safe and compliant across different environments and devices.

• Industry-leading artificial intelligence capabilities, helping you to find answers faster and discover hidden insights with natural language queries, automated machine learning, and smart narratives.

• Best-in-class mobile experiences with Power BI Mobile, allowing you to access and interact with your data anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

• Cloud maturity and reliability, relying on one of the largest and fastest growing BI clouds in the world, with over 250,000 organizations and 97 percent of Fortune 500 using Power BI2.

• Rapid, user-driven innovation, with new features released weekly based on user feedback and community input.

• Economics to drive a data culture, with affordable and flexible pricing options that enable everyone in your organization to make data-driven decisions.

To learn more about Power BI and how it can help you transform your data into immediate impact, you can download the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms report.  Or visit the Power BI website.

Benefits of choosing Power BI

Here are some of the benefits of choosing Power BI for your organisation:

• Power BI can connect to various data sources, such as Excel, SQL Server, Azure, and more, and provide a unified view of your data. You can easily create interactive dashboards and reports that visualise your data and reveal hidden patterns and trends.

• Power BI can improve your efficiency and productivity by automating data refresh and report delivery, enabling self-service analytics, and providing AI-powered features such as Copilot, which can generate reports and insights based on natural language queries.

• Power BI can help you make better decisions by providing data-driven insights and recommendations, supporting what-if analysis and scenario planning, and integrating with Azure Machine Learning and other advanced analytics tools.

• Power BI can enhance your collaboration and communication by allowing you to share and publish your reports and dashboards with others, embed them in websites and apps, and access them from any device. You can also comment, annotate, and chat with your colleagues within Power BI.

• Power BI can reduce your costs and improve your ROI by offering a low monthly price per user, a free desktop version, and a scalable cloud service. You can also benefit from the regular updates and innovations that Microsoft brings to Power BI every month.