So here we are, it’s the year 2016 and things are looking sweeter than ever!!! Have you ever heard of PowerBI? You haven’t? Well, you should get to know all about it…..and for a very good reason.

The old days…

Long gone are the days when companies need the help of an IT department, IT Guru or the like. The days when it took weeks or even months to turn raw organisational data from meaningless and dull to beautiful and meaningful dashboards (well somewhat) .  This also often required the assistance of a whole team of IT Professionals to get the job done……and still after all the waiting (and grinding), there were always the IT team’s own spin on your requirements and sometimes………..they completely missed it.  So back to the drawing board they went. Oh did I forget to mention that it was also very, very expensive. If you were a Small, Medium and Micro-sized Enterprise (SMMEs), you had to procure the services of an external IT service provider,  and most companies could not afford that anyway.

The new…

So who should use this powerful tool to catapult their business into cyberspace? The answer is simple….anyone and everyone!! Whether you are an accountant, a sales or marketing manager, supervisor or CEO…..these tools are for you. They are self-service BI tools that allow you to gain the insights into your work or business, share those insights with stakeholders, partners or colleagues or to monitor performance of your team. The possibilities are endless, and the main reason why I made Power BI my business – it is a real game changer and a BIG move from how we have done things in the old days.

So what is PowerBI? 

PowerBI has a very interesting history and perhaps we’ll get to that story in another post, but the official definition of what PowerBI is, is this

“Power BI is a cloud service that lets you share, collaborate and access your Excel reports anywhere on any device.”

As exhilarating as that sounds for most excel users…..it is!! It’s actually allot more than that………….we’ll also explore that in the next post (baby steps people, baby steps).

For now, I have posted a video from Microsoft below as a little taste of things to come. And while this video does not even remotely cover the functionality of what I would like to call the “PowerBI weapons of mass data-struction”, it should give you and your company enough reasons to explore this further.

This is PowerBI

So there it is, the first post of many. So hold on to your seats people as this ride is going to get awesome!!

If this was enough to get you to join the Data Revolution right now, drop me a mail and let’s turn your business from average into world class!!

Please remember to drop me your comments below.

 

All the best…

 

Llewellyn Holtshausen (aka Llew)

Polymath Consulting (Pty) Ltd

llew@polymathconsulting.co.za

+27810274991

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