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If you are in the business world, you likely 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 may be, this is the article for you, as it discusses everything you’ll want 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Microsoft BI is an interactive software product that has a primary focus on business intelligence and was originally made by Microsoft. The program is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn unrelated sources of data into visually appealing and interactive insights in [currentyear].
If you would like to learn more about Microsoft BI, like how your company can benefit from using it, how it works, and so much more, you’ll want to read on for more facts!
How Does Business Intelligence Work?
There are four important steps that BI follows in order to transform raw data into easy-to-understand insights for everyone in an organization to use.
Data collection, analysis, and visualization are the first three steps and they set the stage for the final decision-making step.
Businesses used to have to do much of its analysis manually before BI tools kind of took over and began to automate many of the processes and save companies time and effort.
Again, the first step is to collect and transform data from multiple sources.
Typically, BI uses the extract, transform, and load methods to aggregate structured and unstructured data from multiple sources.
The data collected is then transformed and remodeled before being stored in a centralized location so that everything is in the same location.
The next step is to uncover trends and inconsistencies, which is done automatically to quickly analyze data to find patterns and outliners.
This process provides insight into the current state of the business.
The third step is to use data visualization to present findings in order to make finding easier to locate, understand, and share.
You will receive these findings via interactive data dashboards, charts, graphs, and maps that help users see what’s going on in the business at that moment.
The final step is to take action on insights while they are current so that the company will be able to quickly move from insights to action.
Business Intelligence allows real-time adjustments and long-term strategic changes that help to eliminate inefficiencies, adapt to market shifts, correct supply problems, and solve buyer issues.
How Can Your Business Benefit From Using BI Tools?
Business intelligence tools speed up information analysis and performance evaluation
This means that they are important in helping companies eliminate inefficiencies, flag potential problems, find new revenue streams, and identify areas of future growth.
Some of the more specific benefits that your business can experience when using BI include the following list:
- Increased efficiency of operational processes.
- Insight into customer behavior and shopping patterns.
- Accurate tracking of sales, marketing, and financial performance.
- Clear benchmarks based on historical and current data.
- Instant alerts about data anomalies and customer issues.
- Analysis’ that can be shared in real-time across departments.
Who Can Use Microsoft BI?
Business intelligence tools used to be only used by data analysts and IT users. However, in recent years, that has changed.
Nowadays, there are self-service BI platforms available, which make Business Intelligence accessible to everyone from executives to operations teams.
How Does Microsoft BI Improve the Way Work Is Done?
There are a few ways that Microsoft Business Intelligence can improve the way that work is done. Some of these ways are as follows:
- Customer Experience – This allows you to access all your customer information in one place so that you can easily direct resources to key areas that will positively impact customer engagement and support.
- Sales and Marketing – Help you to gain visibility into sales and marketing performance, consumer behavior, and buying trends, which ensures future marketing initiatives are effective and drive revenue.
- Operations – These allow you to improve your operations by automating routine analytics tasks, refining processes, reducing inefficiencies, and increasing productivity.
- Finance – This lets you use custom dashboards to get a holistic view of the company’s financial health, study historical data, calculate risk, and predict trends.
- Inventory Control – This Automates your data analysis and reporting to improve inventory management, accelerate fulfillment, and help anticipate buying trends.
- Security and Compliance – This will centralize your data in order to improve accuracy and transparency, making it easier to uncover errors and security issues, and reduce the number of compliance risks.
When looking to use BI tools, look for a product that’s only secure, but compliant, globally available, and of course, trusted.
Your BI tools should also have features that make your insights accessible to your entire organization.
An example of this is that everyone should have access to data visualization, shared dashboards, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
To know more, you can also read our posts on Microsoft Bitlocker, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Cortana.
Conclusion
Microsoft BI can now be used by anyone and is made up of a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together.
It’s used for uncovering insights for making strategic decisions within your company and helping you to organize them in order to make your business run more smoothly with fewer interruptions.
