Without data analytics to manage and analyse the increasing volume of information, enterprises are missing on many potential business insights about customers and market competitiveness.
On average, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics, according to research firm Forrester. Reasons include increasing information complexity, lack of data scientists to make sense of the data, and sometimes cost factors and low resources available to implement new technologies.
Business intelligence (BI) applications such as Microsoft Power BI can handle information complexity and process information to result in actionable insights. These allow executives and other decision-makers to more easily identify complex data trends and insights and act on them without delay.
BI tools are often designed to be self-service to users, from employees to top management, without needing the expertise of business analysts, removing that barrier cost.
A clear advantage is the extensive use of graphics and visualisations that make information readily available and easily digestible for presentation and reporting, saving substantial time with report preparations.
By comparison, traditional spreadsheets take longer to analyse and can still miss important information, as the analysis depends on manual research and interpretation. That is not to say that traditional analysis and reporting is not important.
However, modern BI applications eliminate the hassle and can aggregate disparate data previously contained in spreadsheets in a central dashboard, unifying data from multiple sources and making it ready for analysis and reporting in minutes.
With so many business intelligence applications in the market, choosing one may seem difficult. Consider the ease of use, mobility, performance, cost-efficiency, the total range of visualisations and reporting, as well as integration with data and other application sources.
The cloud-based Microsoft Power BI is freely available for desktop and for mobile use on a user subscription basis, offering the flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency modern business requires. Its advantage in the marketplace is the user-friendliness of the platform and the strong integration with popular Office tools and other business applications.
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