microsoft power bi - incremental group

1 MICROSOFT POWER BIincrementalgroup.co.uk

PRODUCT

GUIDE

Microsoft Power BIProduct guide


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Section 1

Introduction Microsoft Power BI is Microsoft’s Business Intelligence reporting and dashboarding platform. Released in 2011, Power BI has very quickly established itself as the market-leading Business Intelligence platform outpacing numerous legacy vendors in a very short space of time.

The reason for Power BI's success is the versatility and usability of the platform. Microsoft has put users of all levels at the heart of the tool’s design. It is a truly accessible and intuitive platform that any user within a business can pick up and start generating meaningful analysis quickly.

Power BI’s straightforward drag and drop visualisations and its robust data querying and modelling functions make it a powerful one-stop-shop for all your analysis and reporting needs. So much so that Microsoft is once again way out in front in the leaders quadrant of the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant.

Challengers

Niche Players

Leaders

Visionaries

Abi

lity

to e

xecu

te

Completeness of vision

Magic quadrant for analytics and business intelligence platforms

Source: Gartner (February 2020)


PRODUCT

GUIDE

This product guide will introduce you to both Business Intelligence as a concept, Power BI and how the product can help you and your organisation realise the potential of your data. This will empower you to unlock meaningful insights to help to drive your business forward.

The guide covers:

» What is Business Intelligence?

» Why choose Power BI?

» Power BI architecture

» Getting started.


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Section 2

What is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence (BI) is the term used to describe the methods, technologies and best practices in the analysis of business data to provide meaningful insight and help inform business decisions.It is, therefore, fair to say that BI is not just one thing, but covers a range of concepts that are utilised in combination to get the most out of your data.

There is a wide array of BI technologies in the marketplace that offer to help put together some pieces of the puzzle. These tools offer organisations the ability to perform historical, current and predictive analytics on the data they hold. All of these tools empower organisations to streamline their analytical and reporting processes through the collection, integration and final analysis of their data, whatever form this may take.

Why is BI important?BI is all about making better evidence-based decisions for your organisation.

According to Microsoft, 70% of organisations believe their data is not used to its fullest extent. However, changing this is not easy, with 86% of organisations stating they are challenged when analysing unstructured data, such as online reviews or tweets.

Business Intelligence gives your people access to data which will back up their business decisions with solid numbers and facts rather than gut feelings or opinion. BI, therefore, empowers organisations as it allows them to move forward on a course of action with the confidence that the data supports that decision.

Not only does BI empower and support decision making, but it also allows businesses to get to these decisions quicker. The operational efficiency benefits gained from BI are endless with BI tools providing the ability to streamline decision making, serve up data quicker, automate processes and visually present users with easily digestible reports.

70% of organisations believe their data is not used to its fullest extent.

Source: Microsoft


PRODUCT

GUIDE

BI allows organisations to work with not only its existing structured data, such as databases, but to also benefit from its unstructured data, such as social media. For example, data can be obtained from the tweets an organisation receives and sentiment analysis applied against them to gauge the satisfaction of customers. This can then be presented in a BI report to help the business better understand its customer base. BI empowers businesses to wrangle data of all types and structures and feed it all into meaningful insights to better inform business users.

Every aspect of the organisation benefits from analytical insights, whether it is tracking projects, or applying predictive analytics to sales figures.

The sheer volume of data businesses generate year on year is increasing exponentially, and for companies to successfully ride this data wave, it is important to put in place relevant processes, governance and technologies to help them not only stay afloat but harness the full power of this data.


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Section 3

Why choose Power BI?Of all the tools on the market that promise to make analysis easier why select Power BI? In this section, we will breakdown some of the key functionality of the platform that makes Power BI the market leader and trusted by 97% of Fortune 500 companies.

Self-service The self-service and low-code/no-code nature of Power BI removes multiple challenges that organisations typically face when trying to work with structured and unstructured data from multiple source points.

Power BI removes the need to have and rely upon, costly specialised in-house resources. Once a developer has created a usable dataset, this can be published to the Power BI Online Service and made available for the whole organisation to develop reports with.

Utilising published datasets as your reporting sources opens up the world of BI to a much wider audience. The developer can ensure that all necessary modelling and cleansing has taken place, that the fields have business-friendly names, and it is appropriately secured. It is also possible to certify published datasets (see section below for more information).

The self-service nature of Power BI enables business users to feel free and confident to work with data, explore it and develop their own visualisations in the Power BI Service. All of this allows for true self-service BI as business users can visualise and split the data however they need, without over-reliance on IT departments.

ConnectivityWith Power BI it is simple to get connected to your data anywhere and in any format. With the ever-expanding list of native connectors that are available, it is possible to connect to any variety of sources from your Azure Data Warehouse, right down to your Excel spreadsheets. Power BI is capable of pulling in and modelling data from any and all of them. It can even scrape web pages and social media, allowing you to track public opinion of your company or products.

You can connect to and combine multiple sources of data all within Power BI itself. Once you have captured that data you can move onto transforming it into a workable model for your reporting.

Trusted by 97% of Fortune 500 companies.

Source: Microsoft


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Visualisations Power BI offers a wealth of different visualisations out-of-the-box for developers, from bar charts, pie charts, treemaps and more.

Power BI is very capable when it comes to representing geographic data with a number of map visualisations to choose from. There are even some visualisations that take advantage of Azure AI such as the Q&A visual that allows you to ask Power BI a question and see the answer rendered in your report. All of this is made possible thanks to the powerful natural language query engine housed within Azure.

If all the out-of-the-box functionality is not enough for you, Microsoft also provides a free marketplace for Power BI visuals. Here you will find additional visuals such as word clouds, histograms, radar charts, infographics and Twitter timelines.

If you still cannot find what you are looking for then you can go the extra mile by bringing in custom visualisations. Utilising the custom visuals SDK, you can build your own bespoke visualisations. You can develop them using well-known JavaScript libraries such as D3, jQuery, and even R-language scripts. If you have the skills, then you can define your own visuals and bring them into Power BI and get the precise look and feel you need.

Powerful VisualisationsAn example of Power BI’s Q&A capabilities.


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Report themes As well as having a great degree of control over the specific visualisations, Power BI also makes it easy to ensure that the overall look and feel of your reports match your corporate style guidelines.

There are a number of pre-defined themes that developers can apply to their reports. Each of these will apply a specific colour palette to your visualisations and the report page. Developers have the power to define your own bespoke Power BI theme. Themes can be quickly and easily imported and applied to your Power BI reports.

It is also possible to save a Power BI file as a template for reuse, further ensuring consistency across all reports developed within your organisation.

Sharing and the Power BI ServiceThe Power BI platform makes it straightforward for you to share your content. Once you have developed your reports, the next step is the Power BI Service.

The Power BI Service is a cloud-based portal which allows you to publish your reports from desktop and make them available to the wider business. It also comes with a broad range of functionality that makes it simple for users to interact with reports and derive additional value from your data.

The structure of the Power BI Service revolves around the concept of workspaces. Each user will be assigned a personal workspace that is theirs alone for storing Power BI reports that are exclusively for their use.

For users with sufficient access privileges, it is then possible to create additional shared workspaces for the publication of reports. Users can be granted access to these workspaces as needed, with specific security conditions. These workspaces can be created based on corporate departments, per project, whatever structure makes sense for your business.

Advanced AI and machine learning Not only can we do a great deal within Power BI itself, but we can also leverage the advanced AI capabilities of Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services. Utilising custom functions, we can connect our data model to Azure and run advanced analytics such as scoring for sentiment or language detection.

Within the Power BI Service users can benefit from AI and machine learning directly. For example, Quick Insights is a feature that can be run against a published dataset, report or dashboard tile. Power BI will then analyse the data and pinpoint trends and patterns that it thinks may be of interest. It will then display these to the user as tiles that can be pinned to dashboards and retained for further use.

The built-in AI capabilities of Power BI enables your people to get insights faster. The features easily reduce the amount of time spent wrangling data, freeing up your time to analyse the data presented and developing actions to drive change for your organisation.


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Governance With one of the key benefits of Power BI being its self-serve ability, how can you ensure your organisation keeps track of its data?

Certified datasets are one way in which you can apply data governance to your deployment. This means that you can mark datasets as a trusted source of data for reporting. The ability to certify datasets can be strictly controlled by admins.

Once a dataset has been endorsed and certified you know that your business users can work with that data confidently and securely as it has met all the standards defined by your organisation for usability and security.

The Power BI Service also allows you to track and trace the lineage of any reports published. In this view you can see the lineage relationships between the various items that make up your workspace. You can then focus in on individual data sources, reports, dashboards, etc. and trace their connection to other items in the workspace. This makes it quick and easy to trace what reports are utilising a specific source. This is beneficial for impact assessments when considering the removal of a published data set or an amendment to a source which a data set has a dependency to. The lineage view makes it easy to monitor and track the contents of your workspaces and any overlapping dependencies.

The admin portal of Power BI also provides system administrators with a useful view of what is going on within the service. At a glance, they can see the likes of:

» How many datasets, reports, and dashboards are published

» What dashboards are most used

» Which users have the most published content.

Workspace data lineage viewer


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Access on the goOne of the key benefits of Power BI is the ability to securely access and view your data wherever you are. Live Power BI dashboards and reports can be accessed on any device with native mobile BI apps available for Windows, iOS and Android. This allows your people to stay connected to your data wherever their role takes them. Allowing them, for example, to make comments, markups or suggestions to reports, while on the move.

Adaptable and extendable Choosing Power BI allows you to drive innovation with an application that is easy to tailor, extend and connect to other apps and services that you already use. For organisations using the likes of Microsoft Azure and Office 365, using in conjunction with Power BI you can extract maximum value from your technology and your data.

For non-Microsoft technologies, Power BI has an ever-growing library of free connectors, allowing you to connect directly to, and extract data from,hundreds of on-premises and cloud data sources.

https://incrementalgroup.co.uk/partners/microsoft-azure/

https://incrementalgroup.co.uk/services/microsoft-office-365/

https://docs.microsoft.com/power-bi/power-bi-data-sources


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Section 4

Power BI architectureIt is important to understand that Power BI is not an individual tool but more a suite of applications that come together to make up the whole product. So what are the different elements that make-up Power BI’s architecture?

Power BI Desktop Power BI Desktop is the main tool for report development. It can be downloaded for free and is installed on your client machine.

Power BI Desktop is the tool that allows developers to connect to data, model it and build out their report visualisations.

Power BI Service Power BI service is the cloud service that is used to publish and share all of your reporting.

Within the Power BI Service, you can create workspaces to help organise your report storage as best suits you. Report developers can edit and develop reports from this cloud portal, though it should be noted that to connect to and model new data sources you must use the desktop application.

Power BI Mobile Apps The Power BI Mobile Apps are available for Windows, iOS and Android. The mobile apps allow you to access your reports from anywhere. You can review and even comment on reports on the go.

Power BI GatewayA Power BI Gateway is required to connect the Power BI Service to any of your on-premises data sources. This allows you to reap all the benefits of the online service whilst still being able to make use of any existing on-premises databases, files, etc.

All of the four elements outlined above combined allow you to develop a comprehensive suite of reports which can be easily shared across your business.


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Section 5

Getting started Power BI KickstarterIncremental’s 2-week Power BI Kickstarter is the perfect way to kickstart advanced analytics and reporting within your organisation. It is best suited for organisations who want to derive meaningful insight from their data with BI but are unsure where to start.

With the Kickstarter programme, our technical BI experts will work with you to design, model, develop, test and implement a Power BI solution based on your organisation's reporting needs. They will cover off the following:

» Deep dive to understand your business problems, gather requirements and define the scope of work

» Sprint timeline defined

» Power BI overview including set up and licencing

» Handover/access to data

» Dashboard design and build

» Superuser enablement and knowledge transfer

» Complete sign-off of solution

» Handover of solution.

At the end of the engagement, along with your new reports, Incremental will hand over your modelled dataset. This dataset will feed your reports and/or dashboards. This will be handed over in a knowledge transfer session to bring your superusers up-to-speed on the solution and what has been built.

Following the Kickstarter, your new modelled dataset will empower your users to self-serve and derive deep analytical insights.

Find out more about our 2-Week Power BI Kickstarter programme.

https://www2.incrementalgroup.co.uk/powerbi-2-week-sprint


PRODUCT

GUIDE

Section 6

Licensing options There are several different licencing options for users and organisations looking to harness the power of Power BI.

Power BI Desktop is available for free for anyone, however, to easily share your dashboards and report on the Power BI Service a Pro license is required for yourself and any other users. The licensing model for Power BI, in essence, is based around the ability to share your content.

Work out how much Power BI Premium would cost for your organisation with Microsoft’s cost calculator or contact us for advice on what licenses are right for your usage.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/calculator/

https://www2.incrementalgroup.co.uk/message


PRODUCT

GUIDE

0345 565 [email protected]

Section 7

Find out more

With our strong track record and expertise with Power BI and the wider Microsoft platform, Incremental Group can help your organisation get started with Power BI today. We specialise in the implementation and training of Microsoft Power BI. As a leading Microsoft gold partner for Data Analytics and a Power BI specialist, we offer flexible delivery options that can be tailored to your needs. Our Power BI services include:

» Mapping – We conduct data mapping exercises to identify all the different data sources that need to be connected and prepare a plan on how to deliver this.

» Implementation – We deliver Power BI, building any agreed reports/dashboards and integrate this data with your Power BI.

» Training – We provide upfront training and refresher courses to make sure your users get the most out of the solution and your business sees the benefit of your investment.

» Clean-up – We support and help organisations who are existing Power BI users improve their data quality in order to get more out of their investment.

Get in touch today to arrange a call with one of our BI experts and find out more about our Power BI and wider Microsoft Power Platform services.

https://www2.incrementalgroup.co.uk/message

microsoft power bi - incremental group

Documents