PowerBI - What Modern BI looks like
You hear it over and over again and I know many of you have experienced "drowning in data". Even for simple sales pipeline and other kinds of reports, it's often a manual multi-step process of extract, transform and load (ETL) from some data source like a SQL Database into an Excel Spreadsheet and then creating various views of the data.
And while MS has done a good job with Excel in terms of providing graphs, pivot tables, etc. Basically it's still a pain in the ass. Additionally, since this is manual - you have to repeat the process on a weekly or monthly basis. Sure you can automate with some macros and use ODBC to connect to a SQL Source for example, but it can still be hit or miss.
Once you have your spreadsheet good to go, now you have to disseminate the info to your team and that often means email or posting to a file share, SharePoint site, OneDrive, etc.
And once you have disseminated the info, the view of that data that is important to any one consumer may may differ.
The bottom line is that you are trying to provide some "Business Intelligence" (BI) or views of key data to your team that provide a catalyst for making decisions on resources, time, effort, etc.
The term BI is not new - nor are things like data visualization and dynamic content. They have been around for years. The challenge is often A) some tools are very expensive, B) some tools are as complex to implement as what I described above and C) supporting on-premise and cloud data views is sometimes not supported.
Additionally, over the years, MS has expanded services around both SQL and SharePoint to support the concept of things like Dashboards and On-Demand Reports, etc. And while these tools worked well for a traditional on-premise world, they didn't work very well when pulling data from Cloud based services.
In the summer of 2013 MS introduced a new product called PowerBI which was designed to address the issues I described above and make it easier for users to consume business intelligence content.
As an extension to Office365, PowerBI provided a mechanism for customers to easily consume local and cloud based content, create dashboards and reports and then embed them into things like a SharePoint team site. The cool part is there is no coding involved, just select your data source, create a report, check the rows, columns you want to include and your done. You even get cool capabilities like mouse over detail and drill down.
Over the last 3 years, PowerBI has continued to evolve and now the number of data sources, visualizations, and overall ease of use has gotten to the point where providing Modern BI capabilities is pretty much a no brainer. One of the latest capabilities is the ability to export a report into an iframe that you can embed into any web site you want.
Sure there are all kinds of competitors here. Tableau, ChartIO, Qlik, Domo, and others just to name a few. But if your an Office365 user and want to provide BI easily to teams, PowerBI is the way to go.
And while MS has done a good job with Excel in terms of providing graphs, pivot tables, etc. Basically it's still a pain in the ass. Additionally, since this is manual - you have to repeat the process on a weekly or monthly basis. Sure you can automate with some macros and use ODBC to connect to a SQL Source for example, but it can still be hit or miss.
Once you have your spreadsheet good to go, now you have to disseminate the info to your team and that often means email or posting to a file share, SharePoint site, OneDrive, etc.
And once you have disseminated the info, the view of that data that is important to any one consumer may may differ.
The bottom line is that you are trying to provide some "Business Intelligence" (BI) or views of key data to your team that provide a catalyst for making decisions on resources, time, effort, etc.
The term BI is not new - nor are things like data visualization and dynamic content. They have been around for years. The challenge is often A) some tools are very expensive, B) some tools are as complex to implement as what I described above and C) supporting on-premise and cloud data views is sometimes not supported.
Additionally, over the years, MS has expanded services around both SQL and SharePoint to support the concept of things like Dashboards and On-Demand Reports, etc. And while these tools worked well for a traditional on-premise world, they didn't work very well when pulling data from Cloud based services.
In the summer of 2013 MS introduced a new product called PowerBI which was designed to address the issues I described above and make it easier for users to consume business intelligence content.
As an extension to Office365, PowerBI provided a mechanism for customers to easily consume local and cloud based content, create dashboards and reports and then embed them into things like a SharePoint team site. The cool part is there is no coding involved, just select your data source, create a report, check the rows, columns you want to include and your done. You even get cool capabilities like mouse over detail and drill down.
Over the last 3 years, PowerBI has continued to evolve and now the number of data sources, visualizations, and overall ease of use has gotten to the point where providing Modern BI capabilities is pretty much a no brainer. One of the latest capabilities is the ability to export a report into an iframe that you can embed into any web site you want.
Sure there are all kinds of competitors here. Tableau, ChartIO, Qlik, Domo, and others just to name a few. But if your an Office365 user and want to provide BI easily to teams, PowerBI is the way to go.
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