Use Power BI to Gain Intelligent Business Insights

Microsoft Power Platform is designed to empower your employees to create business solutions. It offers an intuitive, collaborative, and extensible platform of low-code and no-code tools that make it easy to create efficient and flexible solutions to all kinds of day-to-day processes. For example, users can create custom apps, automate workflows, analyse data, and build chatbots – all with minimal to no programming knowledge. 

However, despite Microsoft products being widely used by businesses, educational institutions, and all sorts of other organisations, many of them remain unaware of just how much power sits right at their fingertips with Power Platform, and just how easy it is for them to take control of their business technologies and design solutions.

In this article, we’ll focus on one example, Power BI (which stands for ‘business intelligence’), however, there are five products in total under the Microsoft Power Platform:

• Power BI analyse, interrogate, and leverage data from different data sources inside your organisation.
• Power Apps easily develop mobile and web apps for any business need—even if you have no technical or development experience.
• Power Automate design automated workflows between various apps and services to reduce all kinds of manual tasks (read more here).
• Power Pagesquickly create secure, low-code business websites. Enable all teams to create data-driven websites faster, at a lower cost.
• Copilot Studio (previously Power Virtual Agents) develop flexible chatbots that can respond rapidly to your customer and employee needs.

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics tool. It was developed by Microsoft so that users could visualise data, create interactive reports, and share data-driven insights across their organisation. In short, Power BI bridges the gap between data and decision making by empowering users to turn business data into actionable insights.

By now we all understand that data, or ‘business intelligence’, is a key component in any organisations’ ability to remain agile, strategic, and competitive. By leveraging data effectively, organisations can make informed decisions, identify new opportunities, personalise services, and increase their efficiency. Data is what allows organisations to monitor performance, adjust accordingly, and continue to innovate.

Still, it can sometimes be the case – especially as businesses grow larger and potentially more fragmented – that they find it more difficult to manage and interrogate data meaningfully.

You see, whilst most organisations have a lot of data available to them, and may capture a lot of metrics, much of this isn’t used effectively. It could be a case of organisations not using enough data (possibly due to lack of data literacy, cultural resistance, or improper tooling), or perhaps they don’t use data proactively (e.g., to find new opportunities, anticipate trends, and think about business from a new perspective).

The good news is, Microsoft Power BI is a phenomenal tool for organisations looking to increase their business intelligence efforts and revolutionise their data experience. Using Power BI, employees can turn raw data into actionable insights and utilise visually compelling dashboards and reports to turn this data into intelligent, evidence-driven actions.

And the really, really good news? Power BI requires no expenditure or infrastructure support whatsoever (if using the desktop version), regardless of the size of your organisation. Users do not need any special training to use Power BI and – much like the rest of the Microsoft Power Platform – Power BI easily integrates with both Microsoft products (e.g., Exchange, Office 365, Excel, Cortana, and Teams) and third-party platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Google Analytics, social platforms, Marketo, and more).

What are common uses for Microsoft Power BI?

Although Power BI is an incredibly flexible and highly customisable tool that’s useful for many departments, it’s often most popular with users in finance, marketing, sales, human resources, IT, and operations.

This is because one of Power BI’s most popular uses is data visualisation.  In other words, users can bring data to life, telling stories about it to others through engaging visualisations – think column charts, pie charts, heat maps, bubble maps, scatter graphs, and so on.

What’s more, the product is also capable of utilising machine learning to unearth patterns in data, quickly generating informed predictions about various ‘what if’ forecasts and predictions and allowing organisations to prepare for likely scenarios (or else change the course of their decision making).

Below are just a few examples of how organisations might make use Microsoft Power BI:

• Tracking performance of sales teams over time
• Tracking lead generation for marketers
• Tracking the performance of certain products over time or in different jurisdictions
• Tracking the performance of teams and/or comparing teams over time
• Insights into accounts payable and receivable
• Demand and supply tracking
• Analysing pricing strategy and profitability
• Fraud and risk management
• Tracking client life-time value, buying behaviours, and churn.

Why Use Microsoft Power BI?

Combined with the fact Power BI undergoes constant improvement (since Microsoft continues to invest research and money into the tool, adding new features and tweaking existing ones), and is scalable and future-ready, the tool also brings many other valuable benefits the table:

Power BI empowers everyone equally

Power BI currently has two versions: Microsoft Power BI Desktop and the Microsoft Power BI service. Power BI Desktop is free, so anyone in the organisation can download it and start using it immediately, whereas Power BI service requires a Power BI pro-license. By making Power BI accessible to most, Microsoft facilitates all organisations, no matter their size, to be empowered through data and create data-driven cultures.

This is important because, in data-driven cultures, decisions are made based on evidence and facts, rather than personal feelings or gut instinct, therefore reducing risks and uncertainty. By putting business intelligence assets into the hands of everyone, Power BI helps make data-driven decisions egalitarian; giving everyone the ability to analyse and back-up their findings with reports and rich visualisations – all of which can be published and shared as dashboards with anyone.

Seamless Integration Across Tools and Platforms

Power BI integrates effortlessly with a wide range of Microsoft and third-party tools, such as Excel, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and Salesforce. This enables businesses to bring all their data into one centralised platform, providing a unified, 360-degree view of organisational performance. By consolidating data from multiple sources—whether cloud-based or on-premises—Power BI breaks down data silos, ensuring that all teams, departments, and decision-makers have access to the most up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive information.

Additionally, Power BI supports integration with popular platforms like Google Analytics, Marketo, and SAP, allowing businesses to tap into their existing software ecosystem without disruption. This flexibility in data connectivity empowers organisations to analyse data from diverse sources in a single dashboard, improving collaboration, data-driven decision-making, and operational efficiency across the board.

Enhanced Collaboration and Sharing

Power BI makes it easy for teams to collaborate by allowing users to share reports and dashboards with others in real-time. With its cloud-based environment, users can securely access and update reports from anywhere, fostering seamless collaboration across different departments or geographical locations. Additionally, Power BI integrates with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, allowing teams to embed interactive reports directly within their workflows. This ensures that stakeholders can easily access, review, and comment on data insights without leaving their preferred collaboration tools, driving a culture of transparency and collective decision-making. By enabling real-time data sharing and discussion, Power BI promotes alignment and ensures that everyone in the organisation is on the same page when it comes to data-driven strategies.

Power BI is safe and secure

Power BI has robust encryption for both data at rest and data in transit, enabling users to protect sensitive information and meet various security and compliance standards.

In fact, Power BI uses the same security stack that earned Azure the right to serve and protect the world’s most sensitive data. Indeed, according to Microsoft, ‘Power BI was built to provide industry-leading complete and hermetic protection for data. The product has earned the highest security classifications available in the industry, and today many national security agencies, financial institutions, and health care providers entrust it with their most sensitive information.’

Furthermore, Power BI’s sensitivity labels feature makes it easy for administrators to alert users and consumers as to what data or information in particular is sensitive and therefore should be handled differently, according to data protection or company regulations.

Developers can also take advantage of Power BI’s row-level security (RLS) capabilities to create and establish different roles for different users. This security feature is especially useful at organisations storing data that should only be seen by certain users.

Power BI has AI-powered functionality

Microsoft Power BI includes several AI-driven functionalities designed to enhance data analysis, automate insights, and improve decision-making.

For example, Power BI’s functionalities include conversational analytics, allowing users to ask questions about their data in natural language. It also includes automatic visual generation so, when users input queries, Power BI automatically generates relevant visuals (e.g., chart and tables) to present the data, making it accessible even for those without advanced analytics skills.

Power BI also offers smart, automated insights to identify trends, anomalies, and patterns without requiring users to dig through data manually and it can break down visuals automatically, helping users identify which factors have the most significant impact on a specific metric. For example, Power BI can show how different variables influence sales performance.

Finally, Power BI integrates seamlessly with Azure Machine Learning, allowing users to incorporate advanced machine learning models into their reports and dashboards. This makes it possible to bring predictive insights directly into Power BI without needing to export data.

Want to find out more about Power BI or the Microsoft Power Platform? Get in touch to find out how Littlefish’s Power BI consulting service can expand the possibilities of your Microsoft suite, driving tangible and sustainable impact for long-term success.