What is Microsoft BI? (all you must know)

What is Microsoft BI? (all you must know)

If you are in the business world, you probably know what business intelligence is and how it works. However, you may not know what Microsoft has to do with it, or what Microsoft BI is.

Whatever your situation, this article is for you, as it discusses everything you need to know about Microsoft BI, from who can use it to how it works!

What is Microsoft BI?

Microsoft BI is an interactive software product with a primary focus on business intelligence, originally developed by Microsoft. The initiative is a collection of software services, applications and connectors that work together to transform disparate data sources into visually appealing and interactive insights by 2022.

If you want to learn more about Microsoft BI, like how your company can benefit from using it, how it works, and more, you need to keep reading for more facts!

How does business intelligence work?

BI follows four important steps in order to transform raw data into easy-to-understand insights that everyone in the organization can use.

Data collection, analysis, and visualization are the first three steps that lay the groundwork for the final decision-making step.

Before BI tools took over and started automating many processes and saving companies time and effort, businesses used to have to do most of their analysis manually.

Again, the first step is to collect and transform data from multiple sources.

Typically, BI uses extract, transform, and load methods to aggregate structured and unstructured data from multiple sources.

The collected data is then transformed and reconstructed and then stored in a centralized location so that everything is in the same place.

The next step is to spot trends and inconsistencies, which is done automatically to quickly analyze the data to find patterns and outlines.

This process provides insight into the current state of the business.

The third step is to present findings using data visualizations to make them easier to locate, understand, and share.

You’ll receive these findings through interactive data dashboards, charts, graphs, and maps that help users understand what’s going on in the business at the time.

The final step is to act on the latest insights so the company can quickly move from insight to action.

Business intelligence allows for real-time adjustments and long-term strategic changes, helping to eliminate inefficiencies, adapt to market changes, correct supply issues and resolve buyer issues.

How can your business benefit from using BI tools?

Business Intelligence Tools Accelerate Information Analysis and Performance Measurement

That means they are important in helping companies eliminate inefficiencies, flag potential problems, find new revenue streams, and identify areas for future growth.

Some of the more specific benefits your business can experience when using BI include the following list:

• Improve the efficiency of operational processes.
• Gain insight into customer behavior and shopping patterns.
• Accurately track sales, marketing and financial performance.
• Clear benchmarks based on historical and current data.
• Instant alerts on data anomalies and customer issues.
• Analytics that can be shared across departments in real time.

Who can use Microsoft BI?

Business intelligence tools used to be reserved for data analysts and IT users. However, in recent years, things have changed.

Today, there are self-service BI platforms available that give everyone from executives to operations teams access to business intelligence.

How does Microsoft BI improve the way you work?

Microsoft business intelligence can improve the way work is done in a number of ways. Some of these methods are as follows:

• Customer Experience – This gives you access to all customer information in one place so you can easily direct resources to key areas that will positively impact customer engagement and support.
• Sales and Marketing – Helps you understand sales and marketing performance, consumer behavior and buying trends to ensure effective future marketing initiatives and increase revenue.
• Operation – These allow you to improve your operations by automating routine analytical tasks, improving processes, reducing inefficiencies and increasing productivity.
• finance – This allows you to gain a comprehensive view of your company’s financials, study historical data, calculate risks and forecast trends using custom dashboards.
• inventory control – This automates your data analysis and reporting to improve inventory management, speed fulfillment and help predict buying trends.
• Security and Compliance – This will centralize your data for greater accuracy and transparency, making it easier to spot bugs and security issues, and reducing the number of compliance risks.

When looking to use a BI tool, look for a product that is secure, compliant, globally available, and of course trustworthy.

Your BI tools should also have features that make your insights accessible to the entire organization.

An example of this is that everyone should have access to data visualizations, shared dashboards, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

To learn more, you can also read our posts on Microsoft Bitlocker, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Cortana.

in conclusion

Now available to anyone, Microsoft BI consists of a set of software services, applications, and connectors that work together.

It is used to uncover insights into making strategic decisions within your company and help you organize them so your business runs more smoothly with less disruption.