2 mins read

A brief overview of Power BI – Overview of Power BI and the PL-300 Exam

A brief overview of Power BI

The BI in Power BI stands for business intelligence. Business intelligence is a field of technology that concerns itself with everything from reporting to using math to predict the future. You may have heard it referred to by some other names, such as data mining or analytics.

Whatever name it is called in your organization, the goal of business intelligence is to distill the massive volume of data gathered and generated by modern businesses into actionable intelligence.

Basing your plans on data-driven decision making will allow you a deeper understanding of not only what you are doing but why. Data-guessing decision making or, worse, we’ve always done it this way decision making will become anathema to your data culture.

The reason for this is that your competitors will start driving their business decisions based on data analytics. Their businesses will become more intelligent, see market opportunities and trends before you do, and respond to customer needs, wants, and desires faster than you.

Microsoft defines business intelligence this way (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/what-is-business-intelligence/):

Business intelligence (BI) helps organizations analyze historical and current data, so they can quickly uncover actionable insights for making strategic decisions. Business intelligence tools make this possible by processing large data sets across multiple sources and presenting findings in visual formats that are easy to understand and share.

The key to this is that business intelligence must provide a business with “actionable insights.” Which customer segment should we spend our marketing dollars on? What trucks will be off the road next month for scheduled maintenance? How many hours has that pump been running since we put it into production? Who has signed up to bring cupcakes to the bake sale? These questions and many more are answered every hour of every day by businesses and governments around the world.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *