Business of data has never been more critical than it is right now. As business leaders evaluate the impacts of COVID-19 and plan for retrieval, they are examining their operations from new angles and asking questions through an entirely new view. With those new questions comes an unsettling awareness, their data strategy may not be nimble enough.
Today’s world requires the ability to respond rapidly to changing conditions like analyzing data across the businesses, perform calculations with speed, and answer new questions in real-time. When business speed requires a “rapid response” tool, Microsoft Power BI is the best choice.
Business data is genetically siloed. Some examples like e-commerce sales funnel include several data stores, such as digital advertisement data from Google and Facebook, website visitor tracking data, and e-commerce transactional data. The data must be combined from these disparate sources to create a unified picture to perform any meaningful ROI analysis.
While there are methods for crossing data silos, most take time to engineer. This requires careful planning and development explicitly tailored to the newly coming out business requirements and inquiries. In other words, data silos turn out new business need into a sluggish project. When changing situations require rapid response, firms cannot afford the time it takes to architect a solution to every new problem
Contributing a different remedy, Power BI helps data professionals to load data tables from different sources and drag and drop to attain a merged view of the business within minutes. To recognize their sales funnel, a company can load data from contrasting sources and start calculating metrics immediately, such as ad spend by period, revenue and ROI by ad type, trends over time, and more.
Talking about velocity and variety in big data usually refers to the data itself, but these concepts also apply to the questions needed to ask. The answer to every question inevitably leads to a series of follow up questions, which cannot always be expected; we cannot determine the real problem. It is required to ask until the answer to the original question is found.
Just like velocity and variety of data, we must acknowledge this question “velocity and variety.” With business conditions changing rapidly, the speed of analysis needs to match it. If we wait around long enough for a cross-silo project to complete, we quickly realize we have more and different questions than initially expected. Then the engineering process begins, and we wait again for the next solution.
This engineering approach to answering questions causes delays measured in days or weeks, which will never meet our rapid response needs. Power BI, however, is made to answer unexpected questions without redesigning the system. Formerly filled as separate tables from various sources, data is linked by generating connections through lookups or dimension tables inside the device. Data professionals can believe Power BI as a rapid-response addition to their other platforms, freeing up time to remain focused on longer-term projects.
Classified to Power BI’s silo-crossing and question velocity capabilities are its data model, which is not restricted by database design or specific questions. While some other answers can cross silos, as mentioned above, most require time to engineer and then re-engineer to answer new questions. Tableau and other tools developed the ability to interact with data and ask questions.
However, without cross silos, the questions that can be asked are again limited by how they are filled in the tool. By difference, the Power BI data model amalgamates silo-crossing and interactive abilities in one tool. With data associated with lookups or dimension tables, it can be dragged, dropped, and clarify within the tool to carry out new calculations and answer new questions. Thus, the data model delivers end-to-end performance analysis that can keep pace with the variety and velocity of questions, especially those that had not been foreseen when loading data in the tool.
A business environment is changing rapidly, so business leaders must have the skill to analyze data across their functioning, perform calculations with speed, and answer questions in real-time. When conditions change that lead to new questions that have not been asked before, business leaders and data professionals need a tool designed to cross data silos and respond to questions’ velocity without changing the system.
Power BI can enable this “rapid response,” and, as a result, we see directly how businesses are using this tool to make faster and correct decisions.
