Fostering a Data-Driven Culture with Microsoft Power BI

In 2020, people worldwide created a combined total of 2.5 quintillion data bytes. And we show no signs of slowing down, with a predicted 463 exabytes generated daily by 2025. With so much data speeding through cables and over our heads, how can you leverage it in your business?We work with organisations that leverage reporting on a weekly and monthly cadence. But, they need to manually export data from siloed sources into a spreadsheet, which someone needs to recreate every time they need a new report. Data analytics tools, such as Microsoft Power BI, help you make sense of your data while fostering a data-driven culture.Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that turns your data into insightful reports and dashboards. It's fast, easy to use, and provides a variety of visualisations to help you understand your data quickly and easily. Plus, it integrates with other Microsoft products, making it the perfect tool for any business.

Benefits of fostering a data-driven culture

A data-driven culture enables you to make quick and informed decisions about your business. Moreover, encouraging staff at every level of the business to make data-driven decisions allows them to change and improve how they complete their work.Building a data-driven culture can have a positive impact on company revenue. Leveraging data to identify opportunities and trends allows you to act on it in your sales department. Enabling better customer service is another outcome of a data-driven culture because you can create dashboards for monitoring customer behaviour and preferences. By understanding what customers want, you can provide better services and increase customer loyalty. Additionally, a data-driven culture helps optimise business operations by identifying inefficiencies. When you want to examine issues within the business, you do not have to send a query and wait for someone to collate the data manually. Instead, you can quickly access and analyse the data to identify and respond to issues in real-time. Keeping a step ahead of your competitors is essential for driving your business strategy. A leader’s intuition is not enough for making decisions about the company. A data-driven culture supports the imperative that people make significant decisions about the business based on data.

Accelerating your data-driven culture

Creating a data-driven culture is more than implementing a Business Intelligence (BI) solution and making it accessible to everyone in the team. To become a truly data-driven organisation, you need to support your team with the following:Goal setting is one of the most critical aspects of creating a data-driven culture. Without specific goals in mind, it can be challenging to determine relevant data and use it. When setting goals, it's essential to be as straightforward as possible to achieve your desired outcome.Data literacy is a key piece in the puzzle for accelerating your data-driven culture. It encapsulates the ability to read, write, and interact with data. A data-literate team can understand and use data to make better decisions; they can ask insightful questions, spot trends, and identify opportunities.Data democratisation is the process of giving all employees access to the data they need to make informed decisions. By making data accessible to everyone in the organisation, you can create a data-driven culture where everyone is empowered to make decisions.Microsoft Power BI is a tool that can help you achieve a data-driven culture in your organisation.

Automation in Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a tool for automating data analysis. When people do not have to complete this manually, you save time and money across your organisation. Furthermore, Power BI automatically distributes reports to the necessary people in the business, so one person is not in charge of sending them around.Power BI automatically completes the following process, without the need for human prompts:

1. Collecting and collating all data, no matter the source, and centralising it
2. Making the data consistent and structuring it in a way that is easy to understand
3. Creating an easy-to-understand report that people at all levels of the company can read and understand

Power BI includes a couple of features for automated reporting, such as:

1. The Power BI Desktop allows you to create reports and dashboards and then automatically share them with others.
2. The Power BI Service enables you to share reports and dashboards for people to access from anywhere.

With automation, you can create self-service reporting environments that allow your team to create and share reports easily.

User-friendly reporting dashboards

In business, timely and accurate data is essential for making informed decisions. However, sifting through mountains of data to find relevant insights can be daunting. You need Microsoft Power BI for this reason.Power BI has an advantage in the simplicity of the platform. Whether you are a data analyst by trade or a business leader, the reports are easy to understand and customisable to show the information the way you need.With the Power BI dashboard, you can:

• Easily create visually appealing and informative reporting dashboards
• Quickly find the data you need, thanks to an intuitive search feature
• Get insights into your business performance with interactive charts and graphs

Microsoft Power BI creates accessible reports that people can collaborate on from their phone, laptop or home computer. With the same tool, you can make reports accessible on personal devices during meetings, so everybody in attendance is on the same page.People can access reports through the Power BI Desktop App. Reports can also be quickly shared with others through email or published on the web. In addition, users can collaborate on reports in real-time, making it easy to get input from others before finalising reports.

Get more from your data with soma

Running a business is already a challenging endeavour without the added burden of time-consuming and tedious reporting. The soma Empower BI Portal leverages Microsoft Power BI to automate reporting and provide the data you need, in real-time.We provide all-inclusive support, maintenance and management of the Power BI platform. As your managed service provider, soma offers a single point of contact, convenience and flexibility for all of your needs.