Business intelligence & goals
Business intelligence can reveal all sorts of insights for an organisation, so it becomes important to understand what it is you are looking for.
Here at Sustainit, our approach to data always starts with our clients’ goals, challenges and aspirations, helping us create data collection points, visualisation and storytelling that achieves clear goals and objectives.
Creating visual charts and graphs for random data points won’t provide actionable insights team leaders are looking for. Instead, these visual aids should help translate and communicate real-time results about specific processes or systems.
Getting started with Power BI
Microsoft describes Power BI as a desktop application that lets you “connect to, transform and visualise.
your data”. This foundation lays the path to create advanced predictive modelling, spot trends, identify outliers and create visual reports that summarise deeply complex processes into single charts or graphics.
Some popular features and uses include:
Data visualisation
At its core, Power BI is a data visualisation tool, helping to translate and communicate all sorts of data into bite-size takeaways. For organisations, this presents them with an opportunity to better leverage the data they are collecting and use it to persuade and influence.
Sharing
Power BI makes sharing data easy. This is extremely important when trying to create change within an organisation as it helps create synergy and encourages collaboration. Employees and teams can quickly share graphs and reports with one another, helping to create real-time transparency and openness between teams, departments and offices.
Power BI also ensures data is secure so sharing such reports or graphics can be done so with confidence.
Intuitive interface
Most companies are familiar with spreadsheets and using Excel for all sorts of internal processes. Power BI has a natural integration with Excel, making data entry and connections seamless. Instead of just trying to use Excel, Power BI helps add a layer of data visualisation and built-in AI capabilities to find and share meaningful insights with ease.
Interactive
Data visualisation goes beyond just inserting some graphs within a report. BI software helps create interactive content that adapts to real-time inputs. This means users can see how things change depending on what information you feed the system. In organisational terms, this can help benefit from data when trying to predict future outcomes or challenges, and identify how potential actions could impact other processes.
This sort of visualisation avoids stakeholders or employees needing to trawl through vast amounts of data, and instead benefit from a single graphic that can shed light on all sorts of processes within an organisation.