4 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:
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:
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.