Reflection on how to improve decision-making with Power BI

Getting insightful data is the engine of better decision making and the use of business intelligence tools such as Microsoft Power BI, Python, QlikView, Google Data Studio, Think Cell, Tableau, and many more have become a thing to reckon with in our decision-making process at every stratum. However, for the purpose of this discussion, I will be focusing on the use of Power BI to improve the decision-making process using Gibbs Reflective Model.

Description

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool that enables the user to analyze data up to a granular form and create a visualization that you can edit, manipulate, collaborate, and publish for easy accessibility by decision-makers. Power BI has the ability to connect easily to multiple data sources to create an interactive dashboard for reporting and real-time data with dozens of different types of visualization see example of a power BI dashboard below.

Feelings

From my perspective, I see Power BI as an easy tool to use for beginners on a basic level because the GUI is easy to understand, import data from other sources, and pick your desired visualization from the available numerous types. The most appealing part of PowerBI for me is the fascinating report or output, it is easy to interpret and equally attractive enabling one to take an informed decision with a glimpse of an eye. The below is a dashboard I created after a few hours workshop on Power BI.

Evaluation

Despite the fact that Microsoft Power BI is an easy application to use for beginners because you can easily import data from Microsoft Excel for instance which is widely used and then pick a certain visual to generate a report but this can only seem to be easy if the data is cleansed and less complex. However, for complex data, it might not be that easy and straightforward because data analysis is all about GIGO (garbage in garbage out) which needs a lot of deep thinking and creativity, especially in the area of data cleansing and manipulation otherwise the report might give a wrong output and thereby leads to a wrong decision-making which is counter-productive.

Analysis

Using a Power BI as an intelligence tool to make an informed or improved decision is pretty easy all that is needed to be done is to get your source data which could be a sales record, survey data or secondary data from a trusted source.

Secondly, you need to clean and manipulate the data as required and then import the data to the Power BI report dashboard or you can decide to import the data first before manipulating the data whichever that is convenient or necessary will be fine.

Thirdly, you can then build the visuals with the available dozens of visuals available on the Power BI application as per the objective of the visualization, place the right data in the right column, format the visuals, and label them as necessary.

Going forward, you can then collaborate with your organization members by means of sharing links to either improve the dashboard or use the generated report for improved decisions.

Conclusion

Finally, Microsoft Power BI has proven to be a friendly to use business intelligence tool to take a better and informed business or organization decision. Most importantly, Microsoft built a powerful tool that can integrate easily with other Microsoft product that has wider usage of users such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SQL server, Teams and many more which makes it easy to import data and also share report seamlessly.

Action Plan

Based on my little exposure and interaction with Microsoft Power BI to improve decision making process. I have taken it as a point of duty to learn more about the application starting with LinkedIn learning and use it to analyse data for every of my report writing so as to make readers take an informed and better decision at a glance. I will also like to explore the collaborative side to other applications for a real time data analysis with an appealing data visualization.