Microsoft Power BI: The Business Intelligence Platform Driving Digital Transformation

For decades, Microsoft Excel was the go-to reporting tool for companies of all sizes. Excel Power Users proudly displayed their mad skills with the program, using pivot tables and other advanced features to structure data in myriad ways, generate multi-level reports, and more. Since 2015, however, Microsoft has had a much more influential player in the data structuring and visualization game: Power BI.

This formidable self-service data analytics solution, driven by artificial intelligence, has lifted Microsoft to the very top of the Leader quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms. (Power BI has held a place in that quadrant for more than a decade.) It has become so well adopted  that companies ingest more than 20 petabytes of data to Power BI every month. That’s 20 million gigabytes of data, monthly, with users producing more than 12 million queries per hour.

What’s so Special About Power BI?

Power BI takes user empowerment to a new level by simplifying how organizations and their personnel derive insights from transactional and observational data. It helps organizations create a data culture where employees can make decisions based on facts, not opinions. If integrated with Azure Data Services it also helps companies make sense of big data, one of most organizations’ most elusive pursuits.

Designed for User Empowerment

Power BI is structured around workspaces, enabling self-service generation of updated dashboards and reports. It also incorporates Power Apps, enabling users to access and share reports, visualizations and other output from their mobile devices (it can even be Siri powered for iOS users) and across the enterprise.

Alternatively, analytics can be embedded in internal websites, applications, and portals, and Power BI reports can be delivered to an on-premises report server. Through usage, company personnel can train Power BI to understand and adapt to company-specific language. Report authors can view all the natural-language questions that have been asked and adjust Power BI’s response appropriately.

Getting to Self Service

Although expert users can develop and deploy some Power BI functionality for themselves, most firms work with a development team skilled in solution enablement. One operation that companies often assign to professionals is embedding Power BI in a variety of complimentary solutions to facilitate data self-service. Following are two examples:

• Embed Reports and Other Materials into Microsoft Teams:
  Once reports and other structured data output is embedded into Microsoft Teams, users can view reports and dashboards from inside of Teams and discuss the data within their team channels. When a user pastes a link to reports, dashboards, and/or apps into the Microsoft Teams message box, the link preview shows information about the link.
• Embed Reports in Portals or Websites
  Power BI Reports can be securely embedded within internal web portals and sites, including SharePoint 2019, whether cloud-based or hosted on premise. They provide no-code embedding into any portal that accepts a website URL or an iFrame (a frame within a frame on a webpage or other HTML resource). The embedding respects all item permissions and data security including applying any row-level security (RLS) settings. (RLS enables firms to implement restrictions on data row access, for example, restricting users to accessing only data rows pertinent to their department.)

How IT Solutions Can Help

IT Solutions developers are Microsoft certified and routinely help companies leverage and deploy a wide array of Microsoft solutions, from SharePoint to Power BI. To learn more about Power BI – and to explore how IT Solutions can help you leverage its power for your firm quickly and easily – we invite you to give us a call. At no obligation, we’ll be happy to take you through a quick tour of Power BI, enabling you to envision its value for yourself.