Power BI — An Optimal Self-Service BI Tool

A modern self-service business intelligence approach means providing transparency and access to information, not only for management but also for business users. Power BI as a self-service BI tool can give your organization the capabilities it needs to empower your employees to make informed business decisions.

4 min readDec 17, 2021

The Evolution of Modern Self-Service Business Intelligence

A few years ago, the ability to make data-driven decisions based on business intelligence (BI) was mostly limited to top management. The organization’s IT team would be tasked with creating reports using their enterprise’s data as requests would arrive from the company’s leadership. A lot of factors complicated this traditional BI approach, especially when it came to other business users in the company:

Lack of awareness of the existence of data
Lack of knowledge on how to access the data
Expensive data storage and BI software
Lack of user-friendliness of BI tools

Today, data is all-pervasive. Every user creates it and is aware of its existence. Some are highly motivated to find ways to leverage a BI tool and create something meaningful out of it. Management ultimately wants to not only make data-driven decisions, but also enable business users to create their own reports and analytics given their intimate familiarity with the data and business rules in their respective areas.

Modern self-service BI has taken much of the burden from IT departments and has put the power in hands of the business users. This creates a cost-effective and efficient BI space with more valuable insights than ever before. If implemented correctly, self-service BI can bring great value to a company and boost its performance.

Power BI as a Self-Service BI Tool

Power BI is a data analytics software and application package offered by Microsoft. It is a user-friendly tool that allows users to quickly analyze information they need and share it within their business network. Additionally, it is powerful enough for advanced users to perform high-level analytics as needed. The package lets you assess your data and offers the following capabilities:

Data connection and transformation based on the business logic
Creation of data models and relationships
Dashboard and report creation
Natural language query mechanism that allows users to ask basic questions about their data
Sharing data, reports, and other artifacts within your business network (internal and external) using the online cloud platform

Why Use Power BI?

Every business intelligence tool is different with varied features to assist organizations in meeting their business needs. Of course, it depends on what is important for your company. Here are a few reasons why Power BI is the industry leader and a great option:

Create attractive visualizations with easy drag and drop features
Good for businesses of all sizes
Available in different versions and pricing options
Makes everyday analysis easy for business users
Integrates with other Microsoft products such as Azure and other Power Platform apps. Also integrates with services external to Microsoft.
Easy and quick to learn
Large community of users for help and support
Access, create, and distribute data in a secured fashion
Functionality available for advanced analytics

Daily Power BI Reports That Business Users Can Create

Customer analysis — profits based on region, demographics, service type, etc.
HR analytics — employee count, number of active employees, new employees, satisfactory score, etc.
Sales scorecard — sales based on location, sales and profit comparison, sales comparison against the previous years
Social media monitoring and analytics — sentiment analysis, web sources, geolocation, online influencers, etc.
Executive insights — new product launch, sales, business expansion, etc.
Attendance tracker — for business administrators to track productivity of their employees
Team performance — top employees, achieved goal vs target goal, etc.
Inventory stock analysis — in stock, running out of stock, and out of stock inventory, and product comparisons based on shelf life, etc.

Benefits of Using Power BI as a Self-Service BI Tool

Allows users to create a report once and generate future reports by scheduling automatic, daily data retrieval from the data source
Enables and empowers business users to create their own insights, thereby reducing dependency on a few experts
Reduces waiting time for reports, enabling quick decision-making
Better and more useful insights as data lies within the hands of the user who understands it better than a generalized IT department
More users create more insights, thereby providing a competitive advantage to your organization

Conclusion

There is a significant shift towards self-service BI in recent years. The Power BI adoption process requires an in-depth understanding of the entire data management system. With the right framework, training, and governance, organizations can gradually move from a controlled BI approach to a managed self-service BI approach and achieve tremendous insights and, thus, success for their business.

Looking for more on data & analytics?

Explore more insights and expertise at smartbridge.com/data

Keep Reading: Govern and Monitor Your Power BI Deployment with Power BI

Originally published at https://smartbridge.com on December 17, 2021.