When evaluating business intelligence platforms there are many things to consider, including the return on investment as well as technical, cultural and strategic fit within your organisation. If improving reporting and analytics is topical in your business right now, then you’ll want to check out this recent Forrester Research study that quantifies the return on investment and tangible business outcomes an organisation can expect from Microsoft’s Power BI business intelligence solution. This includes reduced workloads, increased efficiencies and even revenue improvements.
As the needs of businesses change, business intelligence (BI) solutions continue to evolve. Therefore, selecting an appropriate business analytics solution can be challenging, but critical to get right. Forrester Research has provided a good framework for evaluating the potential impact of Power BI in an organisation based on the findings of customers currently using the platform. Key findings of the research include:
Quantifiable Benefits
- Improved analytics delivered tangible business benefits. Companies experienced a wide range of business benefits due to better and timelier analysis and decision making by using Power BI. These benefits include things such as increased revenues, decreased operating and supply chain costs, and faster entry into new markets.
- Moving to Power BI reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO). Power BI promotes data democratisation, which means the amount of data analytics projects and users could increase without growing the core data analytics team as much and other vendor solutions could be retired. The total TCO savings over three years is $2.3 million.
- Power BI users saved time because of faster access to important information. Business users across many different roles became more efficient because they were not waiting for reports to become available or for a centralised data analytics team to complete new data analytics projects. The time savings vary by role, and the average savings was 1.25 hours per week. Applying a 50% productivity capture (because not all productivity gains translate into additional work), the composite organisation achieves $3.6 million in efficiencies.
Unquantifiable Benefits
The interviewed organisations also experienced the following benefits:
- Power BI was found to empower users, which increased employee satisfaction. Creating a data-driven and data-democratisation culture increased employee satisfaction because employees felt more empowered to make meaningful contributions to the organisation. This translates into benefits such as better employee retention.
- Security and compliance also improved. Power BI helped with challenges such as data segregation to make sure users cannot access information they should not. This improved overall data security and can help with internal and regulatory compliance.
Forrester’s interviews and surveys of Power BI customers, and subsequent financial analysis found that a similar organisation based on these organisations would experience benefits of $8.9 million over three years versus costs of $1.9 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $7.0 million and an ROI of 366%.
We find that when data is digestible and available to everyone in a company, executives hone corporate strategy, managers use resources more efficiently, and analysts discover powerful insights. If you’d like to know more about how to make the most of Microsoft Power BI or the rest of the Microsoft data and analytics suite then reach out, as BoomData are specialists in these areas.
To read the full Forrester report click below.
