Business Intelligence/Analytics and Power BI
Business insight is a powerful tool to have at all levels and parts of an organization. Entrepreneurs, sales practitioners, executives, leaders, accounting professionals, and literally every profession requiring timely decision making would benefit from business intelligence and analytics. Insight is great to have in other aspects of our lives, but it is imperative in business. When it comes to business, insightfulness comes from deep business analytics, experience, and knowing your business and industry. With the proper business intelligence, you can gain regular insight into your operations, trends, and emerging patterns. Many companies now offer business analytics and intelligence software. From the Microsoft shop, their offering is Power BI, a truly powerful analytics and reporting engine that can take your business insight to new levels.
What Does Power BI Offer?
Microsoft Power BI delivers insights based on data derived from data sources you already have employed in your business. Whether pulling from Excel, SQL Server, Access, csv, text file or NoSQL database, you can get dashboards and analytical reports which drill down into the data and can bring patterns and trends to the surface. A nice aspect of the software is that no matter where your data lives or how you do your computing (i.e., cloud, on-premise or mobile), there is a version or extension of the software that allows you to fully use the software on whichever platform you deem. Also, the reports and dashboard information that you build can be shared in multiple ways (e.g., a website, email, integrated into a Word document, etc.). Additionally, when sharing the visual analytics, you do not have to share or provide access to the underlying data — an important feature for maintaining data security and integrity. Not having to share the data in order to render the dashboards and reports also makes the business analytics technology and the information gleaned from it streamlined and portable
How is Business Intelligence Important on an Executive Level?
Just like a government intelligence agency provides deep insights into performance, either collaboratively or at the individual level, so too can be said of intelligence for business executives. Instead of clandestine, James Bond-like secret agents, executives have top level looks at the overall business operation, with the ability to drill down into any aspect as needed. By having this bifurcated ability, senior level management can quickly assess performance and analyze key metrics. Otherwise, without such information, an executive would have no way to know about glaring deficiencies in performance or to address blind spots within operations.
Another aspect of the importance of having this visually stimulating data presentation is that, as an executive or high-level decision maker, it frees you from having to be involved in the data’s processing and programmer level development of the reports and dashboards. This freedom from development level activities means that you can make better use of your time and energy to focus on the analysis, strategy, and decision making efforts that the availability of business intelligence provides.
Utilization of a software program like Power BI quickly becomes a tool for effective management. Senior level managers prefer the use of summary software like this that enables them to do analysis without losing too much time to getting the data and having it presented in an efficient manner. The visually stunning and information rich reporting and dashboards quickly become a part of any manager’s daily routine.
How Can Business Analytics Improve Your Business?
In addition to the aforementioned ability to free up your time so that you can focus on strategic initiatives for the business, deep analytics themselves can help make your business operations more efficient just based on the relative information that it can help present. For example, having a report run daily on the number of units produced in the eastern factory yields important insights into the use of employees and resources in that production mix. Or, as another example, having a daily report that highlights last night’s dinner sales at a restaurant could show that a new dish was so popular that it sold out, indicating the need to offer that meal as a permanent menu option. These are just some of the ways that analysis of analytics can benefit your business.
Another benefit for businesses can be found in the ‘bottom-line.’ Real ‘bottom-line’ results are evident in increased return on investment (ROI), reduced information technology (IT) development costs and increased operational efficiencies. The increased ROI is due in large part because of the relatively small investment required to utilize this software. Some versions of the software are offered for free by Microsoft, while full access to the cloud-based version is available for a low price under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business/pricing model. In terms of the IT development cost savings, the output would have required a multi-person and hefty price tag to develop, support and maintain just a few years ago. Now, many of the features are out-of-the-box and simple to use, eliminating the need for a large development team to support just this one area. The operational efficiencies are gained as noted above and as a result of having better and more relevant information. Greater efficiencies also tie back to the increase in ROI. Even advanced utilization and functionality of Power BI would only require a small team or even one full or part-time developer to produce and maintain. Complete custom development of similar business intelligence would have required entire development teams just a few years ago. This circular relationship helps fuel increasing benefits from the implementation and usage of the analytics software.
Conclusion
When it comes to business intelligence and business analytics, utilizing Power BI offers a way to gain great insights into exactly how your business is performing. Knowledge is power and key when trying to ascertain your business operations’ efficiencies, strengths, and weaknesses. Having dashboards and reports that present important data, trends and statistics will help you, the executive, leader, and decision maker, assess strategic operations for your business and its success. Ultimately, this analytical information can help you make intelligent choices regarding your business that will help increase ROI, lower IT development costs and increase your business’ functionality and operational effectiveness. It is easy to see why so many businesses have turned to and now incorporate some level of analytics and intelligence into their daily processes.
