Remember that time you worked for weeks to get last quarter’s numbers to your boss? It felt like success, didn’t it? You did a great job working with IT to pull everything together, and she absolutely needed last quarter’s numbers.
But really, didn’t she need them last quarter?
What if you could give her this quarter’s numbers—today? Why not next quarter’s? Before now that might have sounded a little crazy, but if you’re already using Microsoft Power BI Pro, data heroics like that are within your reach.
Lead your data culture
With Power BI Pro, you’ve learned how to shape data into a unified view in less time and with less effort, so you can deliver valuable business insight to decision makers when they need it. You don’t have to stop there. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks about using data to change business culture so that, he says, “every organization, every team and every individual is empowered to do great things because of the data at their fingertips.” Now might be the right time for you to use the enhanced functionality in Power BI Pro to become a business intelligence hero—and help build a data culture in your organization.
Start with live connections to all your data sources—in the cloud or on-premises—and all your finance, IT, marketing, operations, sales, and other business data unified in one place. Then schedule multiple data refreshes per day to keep everything and everybody up to date. Then you’ll be prepared for real-time analytics at any scale. You can help your colleagues—and your bosses—make decisions and take action based on what’s happening right now, or even make reliable predictions about what’s going to happen.
Spread the value
If that doesn’t get you noticed, just wait. The work that people will do now with your reports—faster, more accurately, and with less frustration for everybody—can make you the hero all over again.
Analysts work hard to publish substantive reports, but they know to expect the emails and queries to start by end of day. I see sales went up; which products performed best day over day? Can we break this down by location and segment? Any new data yet? It’s frustrating for the analysts who thought they were done, and for the people who still don’t have the answers they want.
But with self-service features in Power BI Pro, people can quickly see and search highlights from analysts’ data visualizations and statistical analyses. That helps them find correlations, trends, outliers, and other insights, without deep technical knowledge and without creating more churn for analysts.
Make everybody a hero
When you create Power BI Pro organizational content packs, you can distribute reports, visualizations, and dashboards to your team or your entire organization. Everybody gets access to a curated, searchable data menu and a personalized view of the business metrics that matter to them.
By combining Power BI Pro with Microsoft Office 365, you can seamlessly collaborate with key stakeholders and ensure that everyone can engage and interact with the right data while role-based security helps you keep data out of the wrong hands. Live connections enable a comprehensive, up-to-the-moment data view so nobody has to wait for the next report or accidentally use outdated information. People on the go can consume data and generate insights on a web browser, a mobile device, or a Windows, Android, or iOS phone.
All of a sudden, everybody’s a business intelligence hero—and you started it.
Build new momentum
Show everybody what’s happening now, not last quarter, and watch the business—and your career—build new momentum. Create a single view of your business and remove the restraints for your data consumers. Get everyone on the same page, looking at the latest data, so you all can make quick, confident, data-driven decisions. Be your team’s business intelligence hero.
If you’re not using Power BI Pro yet, test drive it now to see how you can lead the data culture in your organization.