Power BI is a suite of business intelligence, reporting, and visualization platform that helps businesses uncover hidden insights in the data. Power BI enables you to connect to data seamlessly through interactive reports personalized with your brand and KPIs. When you integrate Power BI into business solutions and data sources, you can drive innovation across your organization. Power BI gives work a new perspective and changes how people do their job.
When BI is universally deployed, it empowers individuals, teams, and organizations by providing the key metrics they need to be successful. As a result, everyone becomes a data hero and feels empowered to make decisions at any scale. Employees can work on the same data, collaborate on reports, share insights across the team or organization, and make strategic data-driven decisions.
Leverage the Power BI tool for the following:
- Create an analytical environment
- Analyze historical and current data
- Monitor data and uncover actionable insights
- Quickly make strategic decisions
When you use Power BI to aggregate structured and unstructured data from multiple sources, you gain a comprehensive view of your organization’s information assets. For example, you can apply automation techniques to find patterns and outliers that provide insights into the current state of your business. The Power BI analytics tool is a powerful suite of statistical, exploratory, and descriptive analytics software that can be used to both analyze data and share insights.
Build trust in your data – Power BI for best-in-class data management and governance
Businesses scale and accumulate vast data assets daily from various sources: operational and transactional systems, smart devices, social media, etc. With the exponential accrual of new data, companies need to determine the most appropriate big data environment to manage and govern that data.
The purpose of data governance and management is to provide security to an organization’s data among its stakeholders and build trust in the data being used to make decisions. Every company needs to invoke the right data governance model and data protection policy to prevent data leaks and create a secure data environment. Power BI is a trustworthy all-in-one platform that can govern and manage data and curate insights from disparate data sources.
Data analytics using Power BI – the versatile tool for different business streams
Businesses deal with massive troves of data every day. It is considered a great weapon when meaningful information can be extracted that is hidden within large quantities of data, and that is exactly what analytics provides you.
Data analytics helps users gain rapid insights into operations, markets, and industry trends by discovering and interpreting meaningful patterns in data and applying these patterns to solve business problems. You can get your data up and running with batch, streaming, and interactive analytics with the help of Azure Data Lake. It allows you to store data of any size, volume, shape, and process and analyze it across different platforms and languages.
For instance, data interpretation has a vital role in banking and financial institutions where it is used to predict market trends, detect and prevent fraud, and reduce risks—all of which improve efficiency. The credit score is a classic example that considers many data points to determine lending risks. Predicting patient outcomes, upgrading diagnostic techniques, and improving drug discovery are a few examples of how data anatomy is revolutionizing the healthcare industry. The applications of data and analytics are seemingly endless. With more and more data being collected every day, it raises the opportunities to apply data augmentation techniques to more parts of your business.
The following Power BI pre-implementation checklist will deliver an in-depth analysis of your business requirements. Plus, it saves you time as you measure your outcomes.
Power BI pre-implementation checklist
The purpose of this checklist is to make your Power BI deployment a great success! Use this checklist to make sure you are prepared for every aspect of your project. Properly administered Power BI implementation can save your time, resources, and budget.
Listed below are the critical success factors you can unleash to begin your Power BI implementation quickly.
Requirements
- Analyze business needs
- Strategize business KPIs
- Gather use cases
- Understand purpose and project scope
- Forecast success criteria
- Spot audience and number of users
- Estimate budget
- Calculate project timeline
Security
- Allow data to cloud?
- Maintain data confidentiality?
- Restrict access requirement?
- Row-level security?
- Publish to the web?
- Verify security settings
- Decide access rights – read-only or edit
Data source
- Check source availability
- Source data volume
- Verify data completeness
- Verify data correctness
- Verify data quality
- Verify data integrity
- Verify data history
- Identify data structure
- Evaluate validated data
- Ensure conformed dimensions
- Existence of data warehouse
Data modeling
- Follow best practices and guidelines
- Follow business rules and logics
- Import data or live connection
- Data preparation, cleansing, shaping, etc.
- Use dimensions and facts
- Consistent measures
- Fast calculations (<3 seconds)
- Define rules for hierarchies
- Perform rounding, scaling
- Do authoring
- Validate accuracy
- Perform testing
Reporting
- Define purpose, goals
- Identify audience
- Define report layout standards (language, notation, etc.)
- Use business KPIs
- Incorporate enterprise branding
- Include report filters
- Choose user interface (mobile, browser, etc.)
Report extraction
- Need to export to Excel, Word, PowerPoint?
- Need to print?
- Subscribe to emails?
- Define alerts
- Define report interactivity (drill-down, drill-through)
Report distribution
- Use Power BI Service/Power BI Desktop/Excel file
- Identify number of users in the organization
- Identify number of users outside of the organization
- Decide access rights – read-only or edit
- Require Power Apps?
- Publish to the web?
Refresh
- Define refresh schedule
- Setup gateway (if needed)
Training
- Train users
- Document sources information
- Document source-to-target mapping, measures, security settings, etc.
- Access knowledgebase
- Access data dictionary
- Go through FAQs
- Watch how-to videos
Monitor
- Check data refresh rate
- Check for data refresh failure
- Evaluate user adoption
- Evaluate reports usage
- Identify support needs
- Verify load performance
- Verify rendering speed
- Calculate performance
Maintenance
- Fix problems
- Provide end-user support
- Administer users
- Enhance reports
Why is Power BI a must for your business?
Your present data universe is so complex that traditional BI solutions are short of scalability. They require connecting multiple data sources and transforming BI information into them, which is tedious. Power BI, the cloud-based business intelligence platform, includes several apps, software services, and connectors that work in tandem to curate data from various unrelated sources and translate them into visually immersive and valuable insights. In addition, the ability of Power BI to integrate with Excel spreadsheet or cloud-based and on-premises data warehouses makes the tool extremely versatile and fit for any stream of business.
Flexible Reports and Dashboards
Power BI reports and dashboards can be shared even outside the organization or exported to other formats such as PowerPoint, PDF, or Excel. Your data becomes more productive, enabling everyone in the organization to make quick data-driven decisions that drive strategic actions while complying with your privacy policies. Achieve more from your data by connecting to all your data sources to analyze and share insights across your organization while strictly maintaining data accuracy, security, and consistency.
Why PreludeSys for Power BI projects?
Are you looking for the right professionals to revamp your business operations with Power BI?
Receive expert consultations and complete assistance to implement, integrate, or customize Power BI. PreludeSys is a Microsoft Gold Partner trusted by many organizations to help them reinvent their processes with modern digital transformation solutions. We have been in business for more than two decades, helping 50+ clients around the globe transform digitally. For more information regarding Power BI services, please reach out to us at your convenience.
