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Microsoft Power BI: the democratisation of BI


Johannesburg, 24 Jul 2015

Today, Friday 24th July, Microsoft launch their new Power BI to the marketplace. It is a new and exciting time to be involved in the world of business, with Power BI being the tool that everyone can use to gain fast and meaningful insights into their data.

Microsoft Power BI is an intuitive BI environment that enables business users, analysts and IT professionals to collect, analyse, visualise and publish data. Sounds good, doesn't it? But what does it really mean for those business users out there struggling to take action based on data turned into information turned into understanding?

Since the term BI was coined by Gartner in September 1996, there have been roughly 3 waves of BI. The first wave was very much characterised by IT-centric BI and the second wave had a strong focus on self-service BI, with a shift of more capabilities and responsibilities to business analysts. The third wave is the most recent one, making BI available to all kinds of users, not just the business analysts. Call it the democratisation of BI.

The key benefits and differentiators of Power BI are:

* Pre-built dashboards and reports for popular SaaS solutions, like Salesforce or Google Analytics
* Real-time dashboard updates
* Secure, live connection to your data sources, on-premises and in the cloud
* Ask questions of data in plain English with Power BI Q&A
* Integrated with familiar Microsoft products
* Fast deployment, configuration and integration with existing IT systems

Microsoft's messaging around Power BI is that it enables everyone to collect, analyse, visualise and publish data, through a variety of tools. In the early stages of Power BI the most prominent role was for Microsoft Excel through tools like Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query and Power Map, ensuring a low threshold for accessing BI functionality by the business community. In the latest version of Power BI, these tools are still available through Excel, but will now be accompanied by a visual data exploration and interactive reporting tool, called Power BI Desktop.

The big cherry on the cake is of course the cloud aspect of Power BI, through powerbi.com. This is a cloud-based business analytics service that enables fast and easy access to your data from any device.

Figure: The Power BI service
Figure: The Power BI service

Live Power BI dashboards and reports now show data residing both on-premises and in the cloud, offering a consolidated view across your organisation regardless of where your data lives.

Figure: The project management triangle
Figure: The project management triangle

Erwin Bisschops, Principal Lead, business intelligence and data expert at Karabina Solutions, explains Power BI with some real life examples.

Bisschops explained how he, as a business user himself, practises what he preaches. As a Principal Lead at Karabina he has to look after a portfolio of projects for a number of clients. At any point in time during the project he has to know where he is in terms of budget utilisation per consultant per project, to ensure that the quality of the project is on track as per the iron triangle of project management: scope, cost and schedule.

Figure: Sources of information
Figure: Sources of information

The challenge was that it could easily take him two days a week to manually track the following items in numerous Excel sheets:

* Overall project budget;
* Hourly rate per consultant;
* Budget per consultant;
* Actual time spent per consultant; and
* Forecast per month.

Copy and Paste from different sources of information were required which could lead to errors. Let's face it, we're all human after all, right? The actual time spent per resource comes from the timesheet system, the forecast is stored in the CRM system, the project budget comes from the proposal documentation and the budget per consultant is derived from his project schedule.

Figure: Project control sheet - initial version
Figure: Project control sheet - initial version

Two years ago he decided to automate this process using Power Pivot, since he did not want to spend two days a week copying and pasting information in a manual fashion. Instead of spending all that time collating the information he would far rather spend that time in a way that adds more value by doing content work on my projects.

In the first version of his solution (dubbed 'Project Control Sheet'), he gathered all the relevant data from the timesheet and CRM systems. For the project budget information he used a so-called linked table in Power Pivot, which allows him to capture the hourly rates and budgets per person per project. This budget data is then combined with the timesheet and CRM data to provide a holistic picture per project. In the example in figure 3 he has the detailed information available for a particular project. With a single push on the refresh button he can now have all the required information available, in an automated manner, in a fraction of the time it took him in the old situation. Instead of spending two days each week getting his admin sorted out, it now only takes him one hour to get on top of all his projects!

Figure: Project control dashboard - latest version
Figure: Project control dashboard - latest version

Fast forward two years. As you could read in the beginning of this article, a lot has happened in that time, with Microsoft investing heavily in the Power BI functionality and building it out to a full blown, cloud-enabled BI platform that provides information on all your devices. Erwin has now implemented his good old and trusted project dashboard on top of the new Power BI offering and is able to make project decisions based on live data, wherever he is. He states that it is great to have the latest information available when you're going into that important client meeting, plus he can view it from any device, whether that is his laptop, his tablet, or his phone.

We hope to have shown you a great example of the power of Power BI and proof that at Karabina we practise what we preach. Together with Datazen, a recent Microsoft acquisition, and custom visuals for Power BI through GitHub we are in for a very exciting ride! For more about Karabina's offering with regards to Power BI as well as a free Power BI Masterclass for selected individuals, click here.

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Editorial contacts

Samantha Durkin
Karabina
samanthad@karabina.co.za