Executives are finding it difficult to get the insight that they need. In our "new normal" of remote working you can no longer ask team members across the office for key pieces of insight to form part of your decision-making process.
More now than ever, business leaders will need data to gain insight to aid decisions. This may lead to action in driving sales, identifying opportunities or lowering costs. A key part of this solution is Power BI. When you consider that Microsoft has a stable of offerings including Office, Windows and Xbox, it is no small accolade that the reporting tool is their most requested product.
One of Power BI’s strengths is its low barrier to entry in terms of cost and usability. The former is one of the reasons why it can reduce your total cost of ownership for Data & Analytics. However, the latter can often become the cause of a serious issue within a business.
Here at Inciper, we are seeing that this low entry barrier for Power BI has resulted in businesses using it to build rich analytics outputs for specific solutions. This is good to see and can certainly aid in its adoption as an enterprise BI tool. We also recognise that this tactical use can add an additional burden to reporting and analytics processes.
Often, we see great looking Power BI reports built on underlying processes that can be as difficult to maintain as that which they were designed to improve.
Symptoms of a less than optimal use of Power BI are:
- Manual data extracts - Power BI Reports built on manual data extracts, requiring one or more users to extract the data from line of business systems to support the refresh of the report
- Manual user refresh - Reports built within the desktop app but not published to the Power BI service. This leads to both a manual refresh of the data and a manual distribution to the report consumers
- Lack of standard data and definitions across reports and dashboards
These key signals of tactical usage can indicate a need for investment in a robust, scalable Data Analytics solution. In other words, to move from using Power BI tactically to strategically.
Automation of reporting outputs will remove single key person risk and reduce costs. Inciper can support businesses that surface data manually or use BI tactically. We can work with you to revolutionise the way the key stakeholders in the business use BI or analytics to enhance their decision-making ability.
Here are some of the key areas Inciper can help your business to provide a framework to support decision making where it matters most:
- Introduce a robust data platform with strong governance
- Automate your data extract processes
- Provide of a common data model and enrich your data using 3rd party sources
- Implement of a suite of automated reporting across all functions with a rich self-serve capability
For more information about our capability and to learn how you can leverage data from multiple data sources into automated, near-real time Business Insights from our on-demand webinar below.
