Organizations that maximize the value of their own data – sourced by activities such as sales, surveys, and evaluations of systems, processes, and people – are the organizations that consistently respond to the needs of their customers and excel within their market through faster, better informed decisions.

Historically, gaining such insight has required the use of complex tools and the assistance of IT resources or data analysts.  Such bottlenecks delay assessments and have a negative impact on the ability to react to the needs of the business in a timely fashion.

With the incorporation of Microsoft’s business intelligence tools, decision makers now have the ability to efficiently self-service their inquiries and gain actionable intelligence.

A current Springhouse Education & Consulting Services initiative includes assisting one of the top five performing Pennsylvania school districts of 2016 with their adoption of Microsoft’s Power BI.

Power BI is a cloud service, meaning organizations do not need to add or install additional expensive servers and software to meet their business intelligence needs.  The online tool eases the process of visualizing data from Excel spreadsheets, on premise data sources, Hadoop datasets, streaming data, and cloud services.

The first step of these efforts was Springhouse’s hosting of the district at the Microsoft Technical Center in Malvern, PA.  This event provided district stakeholders with the opportunity to individually explore the Power BI service first hand.

After being introduced to the interface that simplifies the construction of dashboards and reports, the group turned its attention to analysis.  The district representatives were captivated by the instantaneous natural language querying known as Q&A.  Q&A is able to interpret natural language questions (e.g. “What is the total enrollment for the year 2017 by school?”) and provide immediate answers in the form of interactive charts and graphs.

As users modify their questions, the visualizations respond dynamically.  Next steps with the district’s Information Technology department were immediately coordinated after having witnessed the power of the business analytics service.

With the guidance of an organization such as Springhouse, executives, managers, and team leaders can quickly harness the power of the tools they need for the insight they require.

Today’s modern organizations and corporations are maximizing the use of low cost business intelligence technologies such as Microsoft’s Power BI (MSRP $5 per user per month) to streamline the retrieval of information, ease the process of analysis, accelerate responsiveness to trends, and increase profitability.

Springhouse is a longtime Microsoft Partner and member of the Chester County business community, serving the Greater Philadelphia area with business solutions for over twenty-six years that encompass technical consulting services as well as desktop, technical, and professional training. They can be reached via email at info@springhouse.com  or telephone at 610-321-3500.
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Top photo credit: Expression via photopin (license)