Item: Microsoft Power BI
Rating: 9
Author: Blake Baron

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, it's only being used by our division for internal reporting usage on our sixteen members to leadership. Leadership can view progress and be alerted to new activities our team has to work on. We use it for weekly reporting on the status of various analyses and how much value is at risk as a result of them.

Pros and Cons

Easy to slice and dice data.
Familiar theme for those familiar with other Microsoft products.
Integrates with SharePoint & OneDrive to easily share intelligence across the team.

It's intimidating for first time users.
It's "heavy" in that it takes up a lot of processing power.
Of course, it's only as good as the underlying data.

Return on Investment

Allows visibility to leadership on weekly activities.
Allows analysts to see their open items and what they have to work on.
Displays area of opportunity when too many open analyses cluster in a functional area.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Online, Tableau Desktop and MicroStrategy Analytics

We selected Power BI because we could push a single source out to a group of people for instant viewing and reporting. They could select from pre-created filters that we selected, but also land on a default view. It's intuitive to use and gets the job done in an enterprise supported way.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Power BI delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Power BI's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Power BI live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Power BI go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Power BI again?

Yes

Other Software Used

MicroStrategy Analytics, Scout RFP, Coupa

Usability

If you've used Microsoft Excel (and most professionals reading this have), then you can intuitively navigate through the Power BI interface without too much trouble. There's a slight learning curve the first time you enter the interface, but that dissipates before long. The filters are creatively designed and you can easily find what you need.

Support Rating

Honestly I have not interacted with Microsoft Power BI's support team, but I mainly use Microsoft articles published online and on YouTube. You can find articles from the Microsoft community or Stack Overflow where folks have asked questions and the community has answered. It's a commonly used product and you won't have trouble finding the answer to your question.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's good to use if you have at least one power user (pun not intended) and the enterprise resources to back it up. It's not as visually appealing as something like Tableau, but it allows an audience to filter complex data sets based on pre-set criteria in a controlled environment.

Enterprise Software that is Pretty Good

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI