Top Benefits of Power BI and How to Make a Business Case

In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, the concept of business intelligence (BI) is no longer foreign to enterprises across industry verticals. As novel analytics tools and techniques are fast emerging, most organizations have turned to business intelligence (BI) to overcome their data management challenges.

In Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform, Microsoft was named a leader, with a strong focus on Power BI. It’s their 14th consecutive year among the best, and the third time they’ve won excellent scores for “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute.”

While it’s terrific news for Microsoft, now is an excellent opportunity to look at why Power BI, their key business intelligence tool is loved by businesses and enterprises alike. In this blog, we’ll look at core Power BI features. We’ll also give you some pointers on why Power BI is important and how to make the case for Power BI in your own organization.

Power BI

Power BI is a cutting-edge cloud-based business analytics tool that transforms massive amounts of data from disparate sources into actionable, intelligent insights. The platform integrates data from SQL databases, Excel spreadsheets, Dynamics 365, Google Analytics, and other on-premises and cloud-based platforms.

The following benefits of Power BI can assist you in making smart business decisions:

• Data modeling: The process of connecting data from multiple sources in order to create rich, interactive reports.
• Data shaping: Using the Query Editor tool, you can adjust or shape the data as needed.
• Data visualization: Using the visualization SDK, you may generate spectacular bespoke visualizations from a large library of data.

The Benefits of Power BI

Using Power BI for your company’s business intelligence needs has a number of advantages. We’ll look at a few of the most essential reasons why businesses all over the world use Power BI.

Let’s take a look at some of Power BI’s most important features:

1. Integration Possibilities with Microsoft

Power BI effortlessly integrates with the core Microsoft stack. As a result, you can utilize Excel, Teams, and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite to tap into the power of its analytical insights. You can use Power BI and Office together to achieve things like:

• Incorporate interactive reports into team meetings and chats.
• Use Excel to work with Power BI datasets or vice versa.
• Power BI reports can now be embedded in SharePoint Online pages.
• Make interactive Power BI visualizations out of Visio diagrams.

2. Simple and Intuitive User Interface

Microsoft BI is a robust, feature-rich business intelligence application that also boasts industry-leading usability. Power BI features a simple drag-and-drop interface, and the Excel integration makes it easy to get started for those who are familiar with Microsoft’s classic spreadsheet application.

Excel users can collect data and create datasets that can then be analyzed with Power BI. Power BI Dashboards may be simply integrated to Excel queries, reports, and data models. With ease of use, you can leverage the potential of Power BI to start delivering greater value to your business.

3. Integrating Business Intelligence with Cortana intelligence

Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana can be integrated with Power BI to provide rapid access to data reports and charts. You can also ask queries in natural language to Cortana and obtain rich, data-driven answers straight from your business datasets.

4. Third-party Connectors

Power BI not only makes it easy to access data from throughout the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure, but it also enables combining data from a range of third-party sources simple. These include well-known services like:

• Google Analytics
• LinkedIn Sales
• Dropbox
• Adobe Analytics

5. Self-service and Easy access

You can use Power BI to get insights on the move, no matter where you are or what device you’re using. You can see your dashboards via web-based and mobile apps rather than being bound to a desktop application.

Power BI offers self-service features in addition to enterprise data analyses. This means that authorized individuals within your company, such as line-of-business employees, can perform data queries and generate reports without having to deal with technical or data professionals- or even outsourcing the task.

6. Ensuring Compliance

As Microsoft puts it, Power BI allows you to “rely on one of the largest and fastest-growing business intelligence clouds.” Data visualizations can be developed and shared across several global data centers, including nation-specific clouds.

That means you can rest confident that you’ll comply with data privacy legislation such as HIPAA and GDDP, as well as industry-specific regulations.

How to build a business case for Microsoft Power BI

So, these are a few major advantages of Power BI. However, now you may need to translate them into a compelling business case in order to persuade other company stakeholders.

Here’s how you should go about it:

Examine your existing solutions

What are the limitations of your current business intelligence tool? How does it stack up against Power BI?

Compare the simplicity of use and versatility of Power BI to your legacy solution- is it clumsy and lacks capability?

Compare Power BI’s Microsoft integration and choice of connectors to your present software, if it doesn’t interface with other data sources and apps. Increased efficiency and capabilities lead to faster, deeper insights and better, more flexible company decision-making.

Is Compliance a key consideration for you?

Compliance can be a big component of your business case if your company works with sensitive data. Depending on the sort of data being handled, where it’s stored, and how it’s managed, you might find that Power BI makes staying on the right side of rules a lot easier.

You could weigh the cost-effectiveness of making compliance simple against the financial ramifications of non-compliance.

Illustrate the benefits using a Proof of Concept

Taking familiar business data, such as an Excel spreadsheet, and converting it into Power BI is a wonderful method to let stakeholders realize the platform’s value. Demonstrate the essential features of Power BI in a way that people can understand.

They’ll quickly notice that the dashboards are easier to understand, insights are more accessible, and that the reports they can create using Power BI are more valuable. You can go even farther by importing data from your company’s third-party platforms, which would be impossible to access using conventional technologies.

There is no denying that you can make smarter and faster business decisions using Power BI’s transformational powers, and thereby add more value to your business. This automated business intelligence application can also assist you in achieving self-service business intelligence and drive competitiveness.

Furthermore, the recent Power BI features and connectors announced at Microsoft Ignite 2020 have a lot to offer your company, including increased data protection, improved collaboration, and the ability to achieve ROI up to 10 times faster.

Try Power BI for Yourself

In these uncertain times, most businesses have already begun creating a strong data culture and capitalizing on the power of Power BI. Drop us a line if you are considering a business intelligence journey and want to take your business to new heights.

Our certified Power BI experts can not only help you integrate Power BI with your existing technologies to enable intelligent, fast business decisions, but they can also assist you to analyze your corporate data for rich insights.