All our operational dashboards are on Microsoft BI. Visualization is primarily what we use Microsoft Power BI for today.
We're in a position to explore all the underlying data. For example, your SLAs, how they're trending month on month, or how your backlog of tickets is going.
We look at all the respondent resolution SLAs or different priorities every month. If there's a dip somewhere, we're able to double click and then go to the actual client or the ticket, which has caused a problem.
You can go back and see if you need to do anything to recover from that situation. For example, if your SLA brings 25% and if you're dipping to 94%, go back and see why you're dipping. If there are, let's say, too many incidences from a specific technology or a specific client, go back and see what you need to do to fix those things.
We're now looking to get to the next level with exploratory analytics. We want to go into what we call explanatory analytics, which analyzes the underlying data. Instead of waiting for something to fail, you come out and say, "Hey, these are some areas that are not working well, and you probably need to look at it."
We're trying to use Microsoft BI and for what we call actionable insights. This tool should be able to build up and show you what the underlying data is telling you. For example, our affiliates may be trending at 95%, but since we run a shared service, there could be some clients where it's 100% and some clients where it's probably 85%. Those claims could lead to a client-side problem or a client satisfaction issue.
Explanatory analytics can give you such exceptions automatically. Then you can go back and work on those clients to ensure that you pull your SLA back up from 85% to 95% and ensure that customer satisfaction doesn't dip.
I think the visualization part is valuable. It's also very easy to build new dashboards. It's fairly intuitive for people who understand the Microsoft Power BI tool.
We're fairly happy with the product in terms of both configuring the Microsoft BI dashboards and making changes to them. It's fairly easy to make changes.
Actionable insights could be better. I would like it to provide exceptional reports that you need to act upon to keep your operations or businesses going. That's something I would like to see.
On the origination side, if there are better graphs and maps to visualize data like I've seen other tools like Tableau do, it might be useful. They need to have very different ways of presenting information. If it's eye-catching, better than a pie chart or a bar graph, that's even better.
I have been using Microsoft Power BI for about a year.
Microsoft BI is stable. We aren't faced with too much downtime. On a scale of five, I would probably rate it at 4.8 out of five throughout any given week.
I think we have scaled up Microsoft BI fairly easily because it's on a cloud. We've added users. We added more dashboards from our different service lines, and we found it fairly easy to scale up.
The initial setup is fairly easy and straightforward.
I would definitely recommend Power BI from a visualization perspective. It's quick and easy to set up and scales up very well. If you've been using data on Excel sheets and converting them to graphs on PowerPoint, I think this is a tool that gives you almost a live visualization of what your operations are.
We use it for our day-to-day IT operations. I'm sure it can also be used to visualize other data like how many clients, how clients build up weekly, and the various stages of transitioning client needs into services. These things can be very easily developed on our Microsoft BI dashboard.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI an eight.
Thanks Peter for the great range of tips for using Microsoft BI tool. They are indeed a must-read for all developers and novice users of this great tool for businesses.