Become an Insights-Driven Business

I recently watched an interview of Boris Evelson VP, Principal Analyst,  Forrester by Microsoft Technical Fellow Amir Netz about insights driven business. I’ve highlighted some of the points made during the conversation below.

Per research by Forrester, insight driven firms are expected to grow 8x to 10x faster than the global economy. Not 8%, but 8x faster.

Insight Driven Firms:

• Have Better Risk avoidance
• More likely to uncover new revenue streams
• Reduced IT costs
• Have Better Security

Insight is not just data. And insights need to change behavior. The flow is in this direction: data builds signals, the signals then turn into insights, the insights trigger actions, which bring business outcomes.

What makes an organization insight driven:

• Strategic investments in technology
  • Data, signals and insights
• Collection and implementation
  • Cross functional insight teams
• Operating model
  • Insights come first before action
• Actionable
• Continuous learning

Amir from Microsoft mentioned that everywhere within the organization they are finding 95% of MS employees use BI daily. Power BI is used as often as PowerPoint in meetings these days.

Some Power Platform Specific Points

Good BI provides a Semantic Model of the business – insight that uses the company’s jargon.

The Power Platform has 3 components that interact with each other:

• Analyze – Power BI
• Act – PowerApps
• Automate – Flow (Power Automate)

Power BI now allows the embedding of PowerApps within reports allowing for what if scenarios to be easily interactive. Analyze the date, modify predictions and forecasts and see how the analysis changes immediately. Flow (Power Automate) allows for the automation of Power BI and PowerApps to be updated by external events.

They introduced to me the idea of Augmented BI

• Machine Learning for data modeling and preparation
• Natural language queries and generation
• Addressing Knowledge Gaps automatically with ML
• Unstructured data – ML can extract insights

Investing in AI and Machine Learning (ML) regarding BI is profitable.

There is a new Decomposition Tree preview feature in Power BI allowing AI to guide your drill down decisions. Leading you to the areas of the business to look at.

I encourage you to watch the interview for yourself.