Is Power BI the answer to data overload?

So is Microsoft Power BI the answer to data overload? Microsoft Power BI is a tool that lets users build interactive dashboards and visualisations. It sits in the Business Intelligence category and competes against Tableau (part of Salesforce) as well as some others.

With any tool that promises the world, it’s good to understand why you might choose to use it (over other tools). What are the (hidden) costs and how do you get the best out of it?

What’s to like about it?

The benefits –

Microsoft power BI features and benefits
Microsoft power BI features and benefits

The Short comings –

Microsoft power BI features and disadvantages
Microsoft power BI features and disadvantages

Intelligence, but not understanding

As you can see above, a tool like Power BI can give you everything at your fingertips. But it still doesn’t address a fundamental problem that data is complex. Especially from multiple sources, so you need to decide what you want from it and the most effective way to structure it.

We’ve worked with many, many clients that have the software but not the expertise in designing data models that deliver not only intelligence, but understanding.

The solution?

Dealing with multiple data sources and messy data is our bread and butter. It’s what we do every day and we simplify as much as possible throughout the process.

What you need really depends on the sophistication and/or availability of resource in your company. If you have a team of data analysts/engineers/scientists then they will no doubt have the expertise to build the solution from scratch. We’ve seen some great examples using Snowflake as this layer.

How mature is your data analysis capability?

How mature is your data analysis capability?
How mature are is your data analysis capability?

If the team of analysts isn’t there or they’re just too tied up with BAU, then an automated central data repository can be the solution. More and more we’ve seen a Customer Data Platform becoming the answer.

UniFida is the fully featured customer data platform for insights driven marketers. Hosted in the cloud, it ingests and unifies data from all online and offline customer behaviour, including web browsing, ecommerce transactions, customer order systems, email service providers, SMS, direct mail, call centres and even retail. It then uses personal identifiers to build a single customer view.

So is Microsoft Power BI the answer to data overload? Microsoft Power BI is fully integrated into UniFida, giving marketers faster access to meaningful insights.

For a chat, a demo, help supporting a business case or all three get in touch today.

How does the UniFida customer data platform work?


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.