EmPowering our Customers’ Reporting Needs

Apr 21, 2017

Today’s organisations are amassing more data than ever before. Accompanying this unstoppable explosion of data growth is a focus on the importance of data analysis, specifically for the purposes of revealing hitherto-obscured insights into patterns of behaviour that can help inform organisations’ decision making processes.

The initial challenge, however, often begins with a simple question – how? How do we start turning these vast piles of data into actionable, insightful information, and in a way that’s easily accessible to the various tiers within an organisation that might make use of it? Traditionally, the methods and processes required to reveal these insights were complex, time consuming and often required data analysis experts to do the work.

We can all be Data Champions

The ability to delve into data and discover previously-hidden trends and insights is a truly thrilling experience. Having the methods and means to extract this information at your fingertips, easily and without specialist help, has until recently been but a dream for organisations seeking to empower their employees with such tools.

Providing them with the platform to do these things has a number of tangible benefits, including:

• Encouraging a strong data culture where everyone supports and sees the value of collecting good quality data
• Empowering employees to seek information themselves and encourages self-sufficiency 
• Improved transparency encourages the sharing of information and promotes data discovery
• Enables everyone to be a data champion, removing the reliance on specialised IT staff and so improving productivity

At FINNZ we revel in leading our clients’ journeys of data discovery and seeing the benefits they gain from significantly improving accessibility to their organisation’s data. To this end, Microsoft’s Power BI is our tool of choice.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a suite of Microsoft business analytics tools that are used to analyse data and share insights through the use of interactive dashboards. These dashboards provide a 360-degree data view where its users can access all relevant information from the one place, in real time, and on any device. With one click, users can also explore the data behind their dashboard, making finding answers easy.

Power BI Embedded

In July 2016 Microsoft launched an extension to Power BI, called Power BI Embedded, which as the name suggest allows you to embed a reporting dashboard directly into your website. This then provides all users of the website with the ability to visualise and explore the data they are interested in using the Power BI dashboard that is seamlessly integrated within a page on their website.

This means that whatever dashboard you can create using Power BI, hooked into whatever data sources are available, can be published using Power BI Embedded. And with Power BI being so powerful, yet so user-friendly at the same time, the reporting reigns can effectively be handed to the business, who know their data, and who know what data they and their customers want to see.

Here at FINNZ, we’ve recently managed to get Power BI Embedded fully integrated with one of our client’s web applications, providing users of the websites with an interactive reporting dashboard when they log in.

This heralds many positive implications for users engaging with our systems. Rather than simply a means by which they can electronically submit data, they can now login and see the data they’ve submitted in any number of visually interesting ways.

What are the advantages of this?

Compared to running a separate BI solution, having this technology embedded has many compelling advantages for our customers:

• Single pane of glass: Allows advanced analytics and data insights to be accessed from within the one login screen, through labelled tabs. This provides an ultra-user-friendly experience as users are not having to open numerous pages to access information.
• Maintain a single login: Access the Microsoft tools from within you system, no separate login needed.
• Personalised data views: Reports can be securely filtered based on account type so users are automatically shown only the data that is applicable to them
• Licensing all managed by FINNZ:  FINNZ manages all required Microsoft licensing so multiple users can be set up to access the system easily.
• Monthly invoicing: Costs of running are passed through as part of the monthly hosting charges, keeping invoicing simple and easy to manage.
• Increased visibility: Increases the scope of our users to include anyone interested in the data, rather than just those responsible for reporting it.

If embedding the BI experience sounds like something you’d like to see for either you or your clients, then just get in touch and we would be happy to chat.