Expanding Power BI’s Functions to Circumvent Market Disruptions

The business world is dynamic and ever-changing. With volatile market disruptions, business projections can change at the drop of a dime — posing critical challenges for leading CIOs and other top executives.

Microsoft Power BI provides an excellent resource for business leaders to visualize current market data — but much more than just visualization is required for those looking to succeed in the face of disruptions.

By supplementing Power BI with interactive Planning and Write-back features, many Fortune 500 companies have been able to circumvent market disruptions in real-time — and here’s how.

Dismantling Silos while Increasing Collaboration

For departmental leaders and executives, siloed information represents a major pain point and is a bottleneck to organizational productivity. Many organizations (including yours) often have siloed information across multiple data sources — and as we know, silos are a huge barrier to productivity, efficiency, and collaboration.

Power BI offers the ability to dismantle data silos. No longer does information, or analysis therein, need to remain siloed, as Power BI has the capability to present pooled data from disparate data sources including Excel, Azure, and other major 3rd party sources like SAP and Oracle.

In dismantling data silos, organizations can take that first step to circumvent market disruptions — whether it’s volatility or political instability. But here’s the rub: data silos are only the first step. So, while Power BI offers a tremendous ability to present integrated views of data from across the org, decision makers must also be able to collaborate both with the data, and with each other. But in order to collaborate with data and people in Power BI, users must be able to input data, too; being able to leverage features such as Planning and Write-back. 

By incorporating ecosystem solutions (aka add-ons), data analysis in Power BI can become supercharged through the ability to enter new projections, do what-if scenarios, and even offer feedback on shared values in the form of comments, in real-time — all while connecting data silos. This coordination of Planning processes not only breaks down siloed data and people; it allows teammates to see (aka analyze) what disruptions they’re up against, and collaborate on potential solutions (aka forecast scenarios) in real-time.

In a recent CIO.com article,  former CISO Richard Caralli notes the importance of collaborative planning to reduce risk in today’s disruptive world.  

If [team members are] not all talking together, they might be planning or quantifying for different risks … They have to plan and run scenarios together. If you look at risk from an impact side and can envision what kind of consequences might occur, you can start to quantify the risk and you can then know where to spend the next dollar, whether to put it on the prevention side or to spend on practices that will reduce the impact.

Improving Agility to Help Circumvent Market Disruptions

Organizations need to be flexible and malleable enough to adapt to market disruptions. Whether it’s collaboration-related or a fundamental shift to operations, modernizing one’s BI stack can help organizations plan and forecast in the face of said market disruptions. 

By leveraging Power BI add-ons, organization members can add commentary, set up “What-if?” scenarios, enter driver-based values, and forecast future possibilities. In fact, forecasting represents a crucial process in today’s business environment, as organizations need to stay on their feet for impending market disruptions. Modernizing and turning BI into a two-way street that allows for not just analysis, but collaborative data collection and entry will allow for quicker response times, more accurate prognostications, and more streamlined processes — making your organization a well-oiled machine/powerhouse to circumvent market disruptions.

Consider the situation: New legislation has been passed that mandates businesses to cut back energy expenditure. Failure to comply with the legislation will result in massive fines for your business. Furthermore, if you’re a publicly traded company, noncompliance can see investors lose faith in your practices, thus potentially tanking your stock and posing severe financial ramifications for your business. 

So how exactly does your team accommodate? Brad Stone, CIO of Booz Allen Hamilton, suggests we view agility and resilience through two separate lenses to foster productivity in the face of disruption. 

“One is about.enabling the business without interruption; the second is about having the ability to adjust, deal with change, and handle the unexpected.” Stone himself provided an excellent example…

Ten years ago, if there was an outage, they’d get past it. But users and business leaders today expect technology to always work and to be an amazing experience; the expectations are so much higher now because IT is such an enabler, it has taken on more importance … Users might not demand perfection but their standards are really, really high.

IT teams at many Fortune 500 companies are choosing to capitalize on Power BI as a way to deliver an “amazing experience” to the business. By enhancing it to allow for data entry, forecasting, and write-back, analysts and decision makers can forecast both operational and financial “What-if?” scenarios to cut costs while offering real-time commentary amongst organization members. The crux here sees that team members are all on the same page, tackling the same solution, in real-time — as opposed to siloed teammates individually analyzing siloes and outdated numbers that don’t roll up to a collaborative end-goal. 

This ultimately offers your organization the flexibility to adapt to extenuating market conditions, all while increasing collaborative productivity and transparency!

Utilizing Power ON to Circumvent Market Disruptions 

In order to respond to and circumvent market disruptions, your organization’s BI stack needs to be at the top of its game; able to not only allow for analysis, but real-time planning and forecasting, too. To learn how you can modernize your Power BI to do just that, take a look at the vast capabilities of Power ON Visual Planner.