We Can All Be Data Analysts
The Digital Workplace team at Capgemini Invent are doing a series covering each element of the Microsoft Power Platform in greater detail. With each edition we will be focusing on how the platform can transform the shape of your organisation and individuals’ ways of working. We will also showcase the benefits, not just cost or time, but how employees experience work, the experience of your customers, and how you can innovate to create entirely new capabilities on low-code/no-code platforms, such as the Microsoft Power Platform.
Data Literacy — Today’s Strategic Advantage
The world is producing an enormous volume of data every minute. We are on track to produce 463 exabytes a day by 2025. It is quite a daunting task to make sense of it all, yet the ability to transform that data into intelligence is becoming an emerging differentiator for businesses looking to win in a market bound by new rules.
These new rules involve actively tapping into opportunities, to gain a tactical or strategic insight from the data that we as a society continuously produce at scale.
This situation is a huge shift from not too many years ago, when data was scarce and often difficult to manipulate in a way that made it easy to visualise.
Today, successful business leaders need to understand the intricacies and insights of the data we create, and design products and services that leverage these insights to maximise value for the consumer. At home, a smart watch can track running data to help us better understand ourselves and focus efforts to improve our health. In business, managers can track employee wellbeing data to reduce the risk of burnout. Sales and marketing can predict consumer behaviour and emerging trends to improve their own sales performance.
We have reached a place where detailed data analytics are now accessible to everyone.
We are now all confronted with deciphering our data in one way or another. Data literacy is emerging as a clear strategic advantage to make full use of these opportunities, with BI tools becoming the enablers of that power.
Business Intelligence — The Enabler of An Intelligent World
Business Intelligence (BI) tools allow us to identify, connect to and visualise data in ways that help us discern a deeper understanding of our world. When used effectively for smaller, less complex data sets, this information can inform tactical and strategic business decisions, without the need for a timely or often expensive middle-person.
BI tools like Microsoft Power BI are democratising the way we analyse data, giving us all the independence to become analysts of our own data.
BI tools are indeed here to save the day, giving us user-friendly ways to connect to data sources in a way that allows anyone to become the new Indiana Jones of data visualisation.
Power BI is a tool we love using for that very reason. It provides deep analysis and visualisation capabilities, combined with Microsoft’s powerful sharing and integration abilities. By leveraging the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and Azure, we can seamlessly share a report from on-premise to the cloud, access it on the web, share a link on Teams and continue rolling!
Powerful data analytics tools are not just a fad, they are empowering us to understand data ourselves, whenever we want, wherever we want, whoever we are.
The Data Culture Paradigm
Leveraging business intelligence is becoming a strategic advantage for many businesses, but such democratisation represents a steep cultural change for some organisations. We can see three main challenges that come with this.
Firstly, we will soon have to recognise curiosity as the new norm, as we all make our own journey to becoming analysts of our data. It can however, be quite a daunting task to encourage a culture of curiosity. Well-rounded, informative and transparent communication, promoting exploration of our own local data to begin with, might be one way to lay the right foundations to ensure businesses remain open-minded in how they adopt BI tools.
Secondly, where there is employee appetite for this valuable, albeit optional extra-curricular skill, organisations may have a challenge in training their employees on what are considered to be useful data insights, and how they can best use tools like Power BI to unlock their full value. Tailored (and importantly, free) training is available directly from Microsoft via their Microsoft Learn platform, which will ensure material is consistent across teams and is constantly updated reflective of new features and functionality.
Thirdly, some new layers of governance will need to be put in place, to avoid what could become the “The Wild West” of data. Organisations need to reduce the risks around shifting data where it’s not supposed to go, deleting valuable data, or missing valuable insights. Such considerations would both restrain the ‘wild’ and focus the insights to ensure maximum value is generated by this new paradigm.
At Capgemini, we work with BI tools every day and feel empowered by them. The time we save in efficiency, we use in developing new approaches for our clients, that leverage the use of these technologies.
Thanks for reading. Have you been empowered by data visualisation tools such as Power BI? Please share your experiences or ask any questions in the comments below.
We’re looking for a Digital Workplace Management Consultant, who will work closely with the Microsoft Power Platform. Does this sound of interest to you or someone you know? Take a look at the link above to find out more.
