Power BI's Impact on Business: Insights from MVP Belinda Allen

We sat down with Microsoft PowerBI Certified MVP and executive strategist, Belinda Allen – where she shared her insight on how enterprise application of Power BI is revolutionalizing business strategies.

This is the first part of a series with Belinda, focusing on tangible, actionable Power BI integration at the enterprise and executive levels.

During each part of this series, we are sharing two tidbits that we asked Belinda:

What is your definition of the CEO-level value-proposition of using Power BI?

“With the implementation of Power BI, C-value executives will have access to real-time analytics and knowing what is happening in the moment without having to ask anyone to provide them with updates, without having to guess on their own, and more importantly – they are no longer looking at what has happened in the past, but they can now dig into what is happening in the present to make the best decisions for the future.

We live in a world where disparate systems are a reality, and they probably will be a reality going forward while line-level managers are leveraging data. So, being able to create reports that integrate the data from multiple sources on to one common place and looking at it in real-time is something that prior to the world of Power BI dashboards was not possible or it took a long time for people to prepare reports and send to C-level executives.

The ability to look at information and make decisions quickly to look for trends, tracking data, and starting to use other resources that are available within the Microsoft family that provide intelligence and machine learning built-in is beyond invaluable for the CEO.

One of the biggest advantages of using Power BI is there’s a low cost to entry and high return on investment. So, the low cost of entry the product that is relatively easy to use for the person consuming reports and it’s very easy to share data. It’s all about the efficiency in getting data, nobody wants to sit and wait on what’s going on. We all expect everything instant in today’s technology era – and Power BI can deliver that.”

How does Power BI feed the strategies that help the executive management of an organization and make enterprise decisions?

“Being able to use sentiment analysis along with financial numbers is becoming more and more important. Sentiment analysis monitors what people are saying on social media and reviews that are left on websites such as Yelp and if they’re showing that they’re happy with your company or not. We are living in the here and now, so if you have a bad experience with a company, you’re most likely going to tweet about it and companies can now capitalize on this information with some of the tools that take sentiment analysis and do that.

The same is true when they’re looking at their CRM systems, being able to monitor what’s going on. Times have definitely changed, you can now create a correlation between complaints about your company and the revenue decreasing. Let’s say you have a ton of complaints about product “B”, you may want to see if there have been new sales for that particular product and if there is any correlation there. We don’t know what we don’t know! We have a tendency as human beings to look for data that supports our theories.

So, if we can do some analysis that takes us out of trying to build something that just supports our theories – which is what we’ve always done with tools such as Excel (creating files to prove a theory of why we are going in that direction we are headed in), we can instead look at what the data is telling us. Being able to be more fluent and go with the trends using Power BI and sentiment analysis is just invaluable.

Microsoft’s Power Platform is also very beneficial and it consists of three products – Power BI, Power Apps, and Flow. Power Apps is a mini-app building tool that enables you to create an app to use on your desktop or on your phone and it can be something very complex that a developer would build or something more straightforward. And you build those out using the single functioning formulas similar to the way you do an excel spreadsheet. So, if you’re comfortable with Excel, you can build your own apps inside of Power Apps. I bring this up because you then can take something built-in Power Apps and put it inside your Power BI report. Or you can take Power BI visuals and put them inside your Power App.

Then you can take advantage of a third product called Flow. It’s an integration tool or workflow tool – it’s a way to bridge things together between multiple applications. Let’s say you are in Dynamics 365 and somebody has a problem with your company. After a case has been resolved in Dynamics 365, Microsoft Flow can automatically send out a form and if someone responds saying no they weren’t satisfied then new questions can appear so you can drill down on the issue and if it’s an open-ended question which I completely recommend then whether or not the answer was positive or negative can be tracked and analyzed, so you can really get to the heart of the matter.

In days past, we would have to read all of the comments/answers to get an idea of what’s going on, now, Microsoft machine learning has the ability to go through all of that text automatically and assign based on shift in tense, all capital letters, and other signs of negativity. You can have this tool go through social media comments, YouTube comments, blog comments, etc. Or, let’s say one of your employees creates an alert using Flow, and if that alert gets activated, then I want it to send an email to the CEO of the head of sales and maybe three other specific people and I want it to include a link to a specific report or visual – and you can do that automatically with Flow. You can even set parameters where if the number being analyzed is less than a certain value, the alert can only be sent to certain people. Or if it’s a value greater than you can send it to everybody.”

We are proud to be a partner with Belinda to provide her insight into the C-level application of Power BI strategies, changing the methodology of business in the life sciences. Stay tuned for the next release of insight from Belinda.

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Belinda Allen is a Microsoft Certified PowerBI MVP and Gold Level Trainer, she is also the Business Intelligence Program Manager for PowerGP Online. She has excelled in assisting partners and customers to implement and create BI methodologies, enabling businesses like yours to make high-quality decisions based on real-time and accurate information. You can find out more at www.saci.com.

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