A Proven Tool
If you haven’t heard, Microsoft announced in February 2019 that “Gartner Recognizes Microsoft as a leader in Analytics and BI Platforms for 12 consecutive years.” This latest analysis continues the trend of Microsoft’s Power BI platform as a powerhouse tool with the capability to model and analyze data that can be shared throughout an organization.
Organizations within a multitude of industries face challenges regarding insights and analytics; the most common being:
- Operational data housed in disparate systems and not being easily accessible.
- Not efficiently analyzing data to help reach informed business decisions.
- Absence of the technical skill needed to create customized visuals and dashboards.
Big data is transforming every industry. For example, the real estate industry, like many others, must utilize all aspects of information across their disparate systems to be successful, utilizing traditional data and non-traditional data. McKinsey & Company determined “nearly 60 percent of predictive power can come from nontraditional variables.” (October 2018, Getting ahead of the market: How big data is transforming real estate)
Power BI at Work
Power BI integration with Bing Maps provides not only real estate companies but all organizations powerful visuals to display geographical information of nontraditional and traditional data. Together with organizations’ aggregated data, Microsoft’s Power BI can transform flat information into an array of bubbles, stacked bars, or colored territories to further enhance the results. The image below represents rent per square foot, with the darker colors representing locations with higher rentable cost creating a visual decision-making tool within the organization.
This example is displaying data from two systems – Bing Maps and the organizational data housed in an external accounting database. Power BI has the ability to merge the two databases together and provide an accurate depiction of an organizational site map, in this case a Rentable Space Per Square Foot cost analysis. The map is a tailored messaging tool that can be displayed for an exclusive group or presented to the greater organization. A company’s decision makers now have a quick access point to review, analyze and make the necessary decisions when investing and developing real estate properties.
Accessibility to information in Power BI has evolved beyond the desktop and mobile applications with push notifications and subscription enhancements that give organizations real-time updates to quickly adapt and pivot decisions based on the business’ current state. Power BI allows data extraction from higher per user license cost systems into a platform that most organizations are already paying licenses for – SharePoint or Office 365. Giving firms the flexibility to segment data based on the particular need of the information consumer without additional license cost is one of the many reasons why Gartner recognizes Microsoft Power BI Tool as a leader in analytics.
Insight on the Analytics
Merging traditional and nontraditional data from disparate systems is critical to gaining competitive advantage in the market place. Organizations must go beyond spreadsheets to modernize data delivery and engage with interactive visual data experiences to provide real-time or near real-time information to decision makers. Engage with Abel Solutions and use your data to drive better business decisions.
This Abel Insight written by Abel Solutions’ Stephen Suba, Manager Business Insights & Analytics
