Recently Quentin Clark announced the general availability of Power BI for Office 365. In the blog post, one of the key issues highlighted is the importance of reach. In order for customers to get deeper value from data, more people in an organization need to be able to easily consume information and share insight.
Condé Nast, a global media company, wanted better insight into consumer behavior to improve the performance of its 20 industry-leading print and digital media brands. The company needed to provide analytics information quickly to internal sales and editorial teams – not experienced BI professionals.
The Marketing Analytics team began a proof of concept with Vogue and Wired magazines, using SQL Server 2014 to pull data sets from multiple vendors including Omniture, MRI and Kantar. Using these sets the team published a series of reports in Power BI for Office 365.
New features such as the new natural-language search feature, called Q&A, allow users to interact with data more easily helping to drive user adoption. Christopher Reynolds, Vice President of Data and Marketing and Analytics comments “Power Q&A will change the way the whole organization thinks and interacts”.
New insights often lead to more probing questions, and visualization tools in Power BI help to identify areas of opportunity. It is expected this new technology will transform business operations for Condé Nast, Joe Simon, Chief Technology Officer says “The convergence of technologies in the platform – including natural-language processing, cloud architecture and an integrated productivity suite with Office 365 – puts deep analytical capabilities in user’s hands in a very accessible way.” You can learn more about Condé Nast’s solution by reading the more detailed case study here.