Power Business Intelligence, or Power BI, is a powerful tool for businesses moving into the digital era. As we continue to value business intelligence and data, Power BI is one of the most effective tools for organisations. In this post, we uncover the Top 9 Benefits of Power BI, and explain how they will improve the efficiency of your business practices.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a business analytics service within Microsoft’s Power Platform suite. It specialises in the connectivity, visualisation, and analysis of data. The service itself is a collection of applications and connectors that work together to build build personalised dashboards, connect data sources, build data models, and create efficient data visualisation. It’s a critical tool for the project management office (PMO), particularly for reporting on both a project and portfolio level.
The service is available in both the desktop and mobile versions of the platform. It is run on a subscription model, starting from a free desktop version, to Pro and Premium subscriptions. Fees also range from a monthly user fee to enterprise-level deployment.
Top 9 Benefits of Power BI
1. Extensive data connectivity
With PowerBI, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to link up content from within the Microsoft ecosystem or external data sources such as JIRA, Oracle, or SAP. All your information is easily accessible through the configuration of data you choose.
2. Cost savings
Say goodbye to massive upfront licensing fees, support services, and technical experts. Power BI is easy to use and is powered by citizen development. That means that you can make your own data sets, reports, and connectors to cater to your specific needs. Additionally, extensive insights highlight ways to reduce risk and costs in the longer term—a significant benefit to organisations.
3. Multimodal support for remote working
In today’s fast-paced environment, having constant and easily accessible data is crucial. Power BI is built for both desktop and mobile versions of iOS, Android, and Windows devices. It also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft applications such as Teams, Sharepoint, and Microsoft Project. That ensures that collaboration with remote departments from your organisation is fuss-free. As a cloud-based service, all you’ll need is an internet connection to get valuable data on the fly.
4. Personalised dashboards
One of the defining features of Power BI is its extensive information dashboards. These not only tap into all internal and external data sources for quality data collection, but easily customise to meet your business needs. With drill-down functionalities and flexible drag-and-drop tiles, project teams can optimise their dashboards. These dashboards provide valuable insights down to the most specific of requirements.
5. Streamlines reporting
No more wasting time collecting data and building reports—the PowerBI dashboards are easily published and shared securely. Teams can schedule data refreshes to occur automatically so that employees will have access to real-time data with minimal effort.
6. Highly secured cloud-based data
Power BI data is stored in Microsoft’s Azure IRAP-certified data centres. This ensures the highest degree of cyber and data security. All your data is presented in real-time, but you’re also assured that none of your data can be lost or stolen. Read all about the measures which Microsoft has put in place to ensure your data security in Power BI.
7. User-friendly dashboards and data analysis
There’s no point in having great data if no one can understand it, replicate it, and use it. Power BI makes everything simple by making all necessary configurations accessible with a single click. Its real-time capability also helps with team productivity as team members can easily work on the same analytical reports at the same time.
8. Power BI community
With over 5 million subscribers and servicing over 200,000 organisations, Power BI has an extensive online community that shares ideas on how to build the best dashboard for you. Developers can also build custom report templates through Power BI API, and share them through external platforms like GitHub. When you’re scratching your head trying to optimise your dashboard, you won’t need to call up an expensive technical expert, you can simply rely on the collective experience of thousands through the internet.
9. Turning valuable data into easy actions
Data and analytics are great, but without an effective way to turn them into actual action, they have limited utility. The extensive integrative capabilities of Power BI mean that your team won’t have any problem gaining insights from your data. They can also link data to strategic objectives and build actionable ways to achieve them. Teams gain valuable insight from their dashboards, seamlessly send it through SharePoint and link it all the way through to Microsoft Project, so that every project action is built on trustworthy data.
Tap into the power of Power BI with pmo365
Our PPM experts are Power BI wizards. At pmo365, we’re all about tailoring the right solution to your needs, and we highly recommend Power BI to our clients. Make sure to book a chat with our PPM experts to see how we can take your PPM activities to the next level.
