Power BI for business intelligence

Power BI is Microsoft’s premier enterprise data visualization tool for modern businesses. Power BI is also Microsoft’s reporting tool for “citizen developers.” Power BI is easy enough to use that anyone with a familiarity with Microsoft Excel should be able to understand and use it. Power BI is also powerful enough that it is the primary reporting tool for some of the largest companies in the world.

Power BI allows users to create interactive reports that lead to actionable intelligence for business decision making. Although Power BI is usually thought of as a reporting tool, it’s also a complete business intelligence solution. It can, and often is, the entry point for businesses that need to start making data-driven decisions. For some businesses, Power BI provides all the business intelligence they will ever need.

As you will find in this book, Power BI is a collection of services, applications, connectors, and software. These things all work together to turn your data into actionable insights by turning that data into interactive, immersive reports and dashboards. To do these things, Power BI requires data.

Data is at the heart of Power BI. But there is a huge problem in modern businesses…

Reporting challenges

Data is everywhere. One of the biggest challenges in modern businesses is trying to get an end-to-end view of what is happening now or what has happened in the past. Many businesses have data in disparate locations. Data is spread out, some of it on-premises and some in the cloud. Companies try to keep important data in large relational databases but many times, crucial information is contained in Excel spreadsheets or in a SharePoint document library.

It is often very difficult for modern business users to see a complete picture of what is happening across the entire enterprise.

Power BI provides an overall, holistic view of all data within your business, providing that single pane of glass that shows what is happening everywhere within the business. With Power BI, you can see dashboards and reports that display rich, interactive visualizations and KPIs from data that can be residing both on-premises and in the cloud.

It has been said that data is the new gold. Data is the new oil. Businesses value their data estates as much as their manufacturing equipment or supply chains. Your data is a valuable asset.

As businesses learn to use their data, they also learn the importance of having that data. But data is only useful if it can be turned into actions.

For example, Cerner is a global healthcare technology company. They track more than 80 million patient visits every year. Cerner uses Power BI to help streamline the healthcare process, providing valuable insights in seconds instead of the weeks it used to take.

It’s not just used in healthcare. The world of retail is being transformed by access to real-time information. T-Mobile uses Power BI to grant front-line workers access to analytical data so they can do their jobs better. Managers and associates can see activations, scorecards, and traffic numbers as they are generated. This allows managers to immediately allocate resources where needed and associates to see whether they are meeting their goals.

Financial companies are usually at the forefront of modernization. It’s not just the giants of finance that are adopting Power BI; Members 1st Credit Union is a small credit union located in rural Pennsylvania. Operating 56 small- to mid-sized branches meant that monthly reports took hundreds of employee hours to collate and analyze. By taking advantage of some of Power BI’s data features, such as automated refreshes and drillthrough analysis, Members 1st was able to save more than 10,000 hours a year, which is huge for a small, rural financial institution. (Full disclosure, one of the authors banks at Members 1st.)

As you will see in upcoming chapters, not only can Power BI connect to many different data sources, but Power BI can also combine data sources. Power BI is designed from the ground up to allow a user to easily bring data from multiple sources together in one location. These connections allow you to see data from your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system mixed with data in an Excel spreadsheet and GitHub data. You can bring together data from hundreds of sources and mix them together to discover new facts, new correlations, and new data points about your business.