Power BI (Business Intelligence) has been available for around a year on the desktop as part of Office 365. It connects to Microsoft Dynamics CRM using Power Query's OData, and allows users to explore and visualise sales, customer and marketing data directly in Excel.
According to a number of recent reports, Microsoft will be launching this powerful cloud-based analytics tool on mobile in the near future (premiering on iOS).
As well as hitting additional devices, Power BI is being considered for a broad range of exciting and futuristic opportunities. We’ve compiled a list of some possibilities.
1. Policing
In the past, police have been forced to rely on historical data to make predictions about the potential for crime in a given scenario. Now, however, business intelligence is being leveraged to help law enforcers preempt and prevent criminal activity.
Individual officers will be able to get real-time information about individuals they meet on the beat. Meanwhile, analysts will be able to spot trends or criminal hotspots by visualising data.
2. Politics
Broad, popular policy making has always been a challenge for Governments. Now, politicians are enlisting the services of BI to aid with key decision-making. An early example of this was Microsoft’s partnering with the United Nations to develop their Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Data Visualsation tools using Power BI.
Now with advanced geopolitical data visualisation, Power BI can be used to represent regional or even global trends or patterns in a data set. In the MDG data, Power BI can predict the ‘Change in percent of population living under 1 dollar per day’, for example.
3. Education
BI is being applied all across the education sector to provide analytics to teachers, school heads and those politicians and public servants who make education-related decisions.
PerformancePoint enables domain-specific report-building that’s pointed directly at the education sector, such as pupil absence reporting. Pivot facilitates massive data manipulation and visualisation, allowing – for example – area heads to see a visual representation of which schools have the best grades.
These are just three of the areas where Microsoft Power BI is being used to improve trend visibility and data visualisation. It’ll certainly become a more prominent tool for CRM developers and end-users.
With these powerful tools reaching new industries and sectors at an increasing rate, we at Conspicuous are here to help Partners and End Users find the Dynamics and Power BI resource they require.
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