Business intelligence platforms such as ITS’ PowerBI Dashboard Service provide decision-makers indispensable insights about the status of their organization. Read on to learn more about the advantages of using PowerBI Dashboard Service for your business.
Organizations are producing a vast amount of data at a pace that they could never have imagined. The amount of data created by companies is growing at 40% to 60% per year. Risk managers and employees are inundated with data sets that are collected from multiple sources.
As a result, organizations find it challenging to store, manage, utilize, and analyze data. Many are struggling to find ways to make this data useful. They simply don't know what to do with the data they have.
Indeed, there are some obstacles to overcome when using big data at a strategic level. Manually collecting and organizing information is simply not an option in today's fast-paced digital environment.
Enter the ITS Data Analytics Service. The ITS Data Analytics Service is an intuitive business intelligence tool that allows users to organize, analyze and visualize data in a meaningful way. Here at Intelligent Technical Solutions, we've been testing the service for a few clients who want to enrich their data and add more context to it.
So what are the benefits of using the ITS Data Analytics Service? What makes it a data analytics platform that's worth considering? This article will discuss the qualities that make ITS Data Analytics Service a tool that should be in any data analyst's arsenal. But before that, let's talk about the ITS Data Analytics Service and its primary purpose.
What Is the ITS Data Analytics Service?
As the primer for the ITS Data Analytics Service states, data is hiding in plain sight. Users often take all the information they feed into their customer relationship management (CRM) and daily task management software for granted.
Users usually don't know what to do with this data or where to start analyzing it. However, with an analytical service like ITS Data Analytics Service, which takes the guesswork out of data sifting and analysis, users can easily make meaning out of the data that's available to them.
The ITS Data Analytics Service uses Microsoft’s Power BI tool which has been enhanced by ITS' research and development department. ITS developers will take in customer data, analyze it and create reports based on the analyzed data. The data is then translated into compelling visual elements like charts, maps, and graphs from which analysts can derive substantial insights.
"People are better at looking at visual representations of data rather than tables of numbers, right? It's easier to find patterns if there's some visual element to it. People are more inclined to pay attention to the data if it's interesting and has some element to it other than just a table of numbers or characters," said ITS Chief Technology Officer Ryan Deneau.
Since security is top-of-mind, the source data is kept intact and is never changed. The developers only copy the information that needs to be analyzed, so it remains accurate. The service supports Microsoft SQL databases, REST APIs, and Microsoft SharePoint Lists as primary sources of customer data.
Related article: Data Analytics: The Business Owner's Complete Guide in 2022
4 Benefits of Using the ITS Data Analytics Service
Being able to present information from a database in a number of ways is indeed one benefit of using analytics software like the ITS Data Analytics Service. Below are more benefits of using the platform:
1. Acquire Business Foresight
Much like flying a plane, you need to know what you're doing when running a business.
"When you don't have any gauges on your dashboard, you have no idea of how high you are, how fast you're moving, and what's going on. There's a high likelihood that the plane is not going to land properly or there's going to be an accident," said ITS Chief Executive Officer Tom Andrulis.
"Being able to have a dashboard of metrics and key performance indicators that you can see and understand easily and quickly is essential to running the business effectively," he added.
ITS Data Analytics Service can thus help you steer your business in the right direction.
2. Interact with Your Data in New Ways
According to Deneau, one of the advantages of using the ITS Data Analytics Service is that you can interact with your data and see it in ways you may not have been able to see or interact with previously. You can get more information than you're generally used to seeing without ITS Data Analytics Service.
“The underlying data is the same, we are just presenting the data in a different way. When the same data is presented in different ways, you can gather different insights from it,” he said.
3. Provide Users Easy Access to Data
The ITS Data Analytics Service may be complicated to set up for users because it is based on different programming languages, and there can be a learning curve for people trying to use it on their own. The database uses SQL language, and the analytical tools have other programming languages, such as DAX for Power BI.
ITS clients need not worry about this, however, as ITS will do the development for them. They only have to have adequate licensing for all the users that they want to see the reports.
ITS' findings show that most users don't need to interact with the reports. You can vastly reduce the number of reports you need, and there are solutions where you can email out a snapshot of the report. Users can't interact with it, but they can see the data. There are ways to get unlicensed users to see the data; they just don't have any ability to interact with it.
4. Secure and Error-Free Data Preparation
There are several ways that the ITS Data Analytics Service ingests data and presents it in the platform to be usable. ITS will replicate the customer's database into Azure. The replica in Azure is then used for all Power BI reports so that the customer's database is never changed.
"We're not making any changes to the customer's source database at any point in time. We're only looking at data in the replicated copy of the customer's database," said Deneau. "The customer doesn't have to do anything for that data. That's just how we get the data into our platform so that we can use it and manipulate it without any fears that we are going to be, inadvertently changing something in the customer's database."
How does ITS then prevent data from being mangled or malformed? It all depends on what's in the source database, but ITS can perform some levels of manipulation on the data. For example, suppose the customers' database has values stored like a string or a collection of characters. In that case, ITS can convert that, so they can use some of it in the visualizations.
Harness the Power of Business Intelligence with ITS Data Analytics
Data quality issues can hamper your business analytics initiatives. Data is the lifeblood of any business; data from various sources will often come in different formats and quality, which can, of course, affect your analytics efforts and, ultimately, decisions. Inaccurate data is harmful to your analytics infrastructure and organization as a whole.
ITS Data Analytics Service provides users advanced functionality to transform and optimize raw data for faster analytics. As such, it is a business necessity to harmonize and integrate datasets to make them useful. With the ITS Data Analytics Service, we prepare your data for analysis and richer data insights.
Here at ITS, we help businesses to stay relevant and competitive by embracing the latest digital technologies. We encourage our clients to invest in data architecture that meets their requirements, leads to easier collaboration, and makes efficient data management.
If you want to learn more about how business intelligence platforms like the ITS Data Analytics Service can help scale your business, reach out to your client account managers today. You can also read other articles about the ITS Data Analytics Service on our blog.
