Powerful, affordable, effective—these are just three of the terms used to describe Microsoft’s Power BI data visualization platform. Its status as a world-leading business intelligence tool supports all the positive hype to be found across the IT media world.
However, every application introduces exploitable benefits and specific challenges once the selection process ends and implementation begins. In this respect, Power BI is no exception.
Has your organization chosen to implement Power BI and integrate it into your business intelligence environment? If so, here are some of the opportunities and payoffs to exploit, and challenges for which you should prepare.
Power BI Integration Opportunities
Let’s begin with a few of the many positive attributes of Power BI, and look at how you can exploit them to great effect in your business environment.
Unlock Insights for All
Power BI is generally straightforward for users to get comfortable with and use on a day-to-day basis, particularly for those who have historically struggled with Microsoft Excel or similar applications.
To fully exploit its usability, though, and democratize your data across the organization, it should be explicitly configured for specific types of users. Instead of channeling data access through your analytics team, why not tailor your Power BI integration in order to allow anyone in your organization who can benefit from visualization to do so?
Give Your Execs More Time to Manage
Few corporate executives have it easy when it comes to using their time efficiently. Strong time-management skills can only go so far in enabling a busy exec to maximize leadership effectiveness. There are always time-consuming activities that must be performed, leaving a leader with less realistically manageable time.
One such activity is the collection and presentation of data through Excel macros—something which many business executives engage in for hours at a time.
You can help your executives and managers to free up much time by eliminating these practices. Instead, let them apply Power BI capabilities to view vast volumes of data and spot trends in minutes, instead of hours.
Show Off UX Features for Fast User Adoption
It can be a challenge to turn business users, and even executives, on to new software. Often, it is usability weaknesses that create inertia and slow down organization-wide acceptance. Power BI, with its intuitive UX features, offers the ability to get a head start on adoption, but only if you engage users with demonstrations to show off these capabilities.
Use Branding for Visual Integration
Make sure that, you establish a branding theme as part of your Power BI introduction and training. Use the branding to create examples of personalized dashboards relevant to some of your key business users.
The branding will help to cement the sense that Power BI is already an integral element of your organization’s IT strategy. At the same time, the personalization will help users to quickly see how the tool will help them to do their jobs.
Demonstrate Power BI’s Self-Service Potential
Remember also to emphasize the benefits of Power BI’s natural language query feature. Stress how it can help users to answer several distinct questions with a single visualization. Explain how Power BI lets users ask the application questions in the same way that they might otherwise have asked an analyst. Overall, highlight the tool’s ability to provide self-service business intelligence.
Power BI Integration Challenges
As this article assumes that you have already selected Power BI as your organization’s data visualization solution, you should already be aware of the application’s limitations and constraints. Indeed, you will undoubtedly have determined that you can endure or overcome them.
However, you may not yet have framed them in the context of integration and implementation challenges. If that is the case, what comes next is a brief heads-up about some of the things to look out for as you get your Power BI project underway.
Easy to Use, But Hard to Master
If you’ve chosen Power BI as your visualization tool, it’s probably because your organization already makes heavy use of Microsoft products. For teams used to working with Office 365 and other MS business solutions, Power BI offers familiarity and an intuitive approach to transitioning from Excel reports to visualization dashboards.
However, while easy to use for those who require a means to import and interpret data, Power BI is a complicated and extensive network of components.
Your analysts and administrators will need to take time to understand the value of each component, how it works, and—most importantly—how to troubleshoot it. They will also need familiarity with the Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language used for performing calculations in Power BI.
Clean Up Your Data
Some data visualization platforms, such as Power BI’s competitor Tableau, come equipped with integrated tools to clean and prepare data before use. Power BI itself does not currently have a data-preparation component. Therefore, you will need to deploy an extract, load, and transform (ETL) application to help you clean up your data or execute manual data cleansing using spreadsheets.
Speaking of spreadsheets, if, like many companies, you intend to link Excel workbooks to Power BI, data preparation is not limited to the data itself. You will also need to consider the way your workbooks are set up. Pivot tables and matrix views, conditional formatting, and summed tables are not suitable for linking to Power BI.
Before linking your workbooks, you will need to deconstruct them to the point that you have un-doctored, flat lists of data. That’s an extra time-consuming activity that you will need to plan for, especially if your organization has many Excel workbooks to link to Power BI.
Delimit the Thinking of Ex-Excel Users
Again, if your organization is graduating from Excel spreadsheet reporting toward visualized data from Power BI, you should be wary of letting Excel’s limitations restrict the scope of improvement.
While Power BI has many elements that will be familiar to Excel users, it is not Excel with visuals. Power BI is a targeted business intelligence tool, while Excel is a spreadsheet application with a much more generalized set of uses. However, it is too easy for users to remain bound by the Excel framework of thinking and hence to underuse the capabilities of Power BI.
Explore and Experiment to See and Learn More
To avoid being stuck in an Excel-centric rut, you’ll need to help your business users and data analysts to change the way they think. Instead of trying to replace existing Excel reports, a Power BI integration project is an excellent opportunity to revisit them and review their purpose. Rather than trying to replicate them, ask the following questions:
- What does the report communicate?
- How will users consume the information presented in the report?
- What type of business decisions will the data drive?
With these questions answered, you can set about designing your visualizations using the full capability of Power BI through exploration and experimentation with new techniques and software features.
Capitalize on Your Power BI Investment
As an organization that’s integrating Power BI into your technology array, you have a substantial opportunity to benefit from a comprehensive and capable tool for data-driven insight. What’s more, the advantage comes without the high price-point of competing products such as Tableau.
To capitalize on the opportunity, don’t be afraid to exploit Power BI’s strengths to change the way different user-types access and interpret business data.
Similarly, be prepared to surmount its limitations by adapting thought processes, integrating additional tools for data preparation, and acquiring the skills to master the more complex elements of the platform.