Daniels professor teaches business professionals how to answer organizational questions using Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft’s Power BI data visualization software program is designed to help users “uncover powerful insights and turn them into impact.” Daniels Executive Education adjunct faculty member Amy Phillips is showing business professionals how to accomplish this in her workshops, Dashboard in a Day Using Power BI and Data Visualization Using Power BI.
She doesn’t just demonstrate or lecture about the process. Rather, attendees are asked to BYOD (bring your own data) for the hands-on workshops, where Phillips provides individualized guidance. Data Visualization Using Power BI meets three times, while Dashboard in a Day is just—you guessed it—one day.
What kind of data should attendees bring to class? Why is data visualization important? How can AI be leveraged? And who should attend these data visualization workshops? The Daniels Newsroom turned to Phillips for the answers.
The importance of data visualization
Data, in its most simplistic form, is information. It could be held in a spreadsheet of numbers or a narrative report. Every organization has data—about its customers, sales, expenses, employees, operations and more—but it can be overwhelming and unclear. Visualizing data in graphics brings patterns and insights to life more quickly.
When those graphics are shown in an interactive dashboard, stories unfold about data trends, outliers and relationships. Data visualization techniques help create meaning, uncover business intelligence and guide decisions for improved organizational outcomes. Leveraging AI algorithms adds speed and efficiency to the equation.
Adding artificial intelligence (AI)
“There seems to be this land grab now with AI,” Phillips says. “It’s making things more efficient and more effective, and hopefully providing better decisions.”
There’s great interest in tools that provide AI capabilities and Microsoft’s free version of Power BI is no exception.
Phillips says there are (generally) four different types of data analytics: Descriptive answers ‘where have we been?’, predictive answers ‘what might happen?’, prescriptive answers ‘what’s the best that could happen?’ and autonomous is where AI fits in. That answers, ‘what can we learn from the data?’
Phillips explains that Power BI has four basic AI visuals to help users understand what stories their data can tell them: “Key Influencers,” “Decomposition Tree,” “Smart Narratives” and “Q&A.” The first two are shown in the accompanying graphic from the workshop.
A sample dashboard from Power BI lends insight into the demographics that influence profits, showing how two AI models—key influencers and decomposition trees—aggregate data differently.
“They’re very useful if you have a lot of like demographic data and you’re trying to figure out ‘is age a factor, is gender a factor, is marital status a factor,’” she says. “Or is a product category or product color or where it’s made a factor? There are a lot of variables you can start teasing out after you decide what you are trying to analyze, like sales or profits. It’s intuitive and the visuals that it provides with drill-down capabilities are really effective.”
Who the workshops are for
Data Visualization and Dashboard in a Day can benefit employees in a variety of industries and roles, including finance, marketing, sales, HR, operations, legal and more. The workshops cover beginner- to-intermediate-level data visualization best practices for business professionals who need to create visual reports or actionable insights from data at work, but don’t have formal training.
What kind of data to bring
Phillips says rather than looking to the data and asking what it means, people should begin with a question, then consider what day-to-day data sources they have access to that could help answer it. That could be a question about a business objective or consumer behavior, for example. From there, attendees can determine the most effective and appropriate techniques for visualizing and analyzing their data to find deeper meaning.
“Everyone has more data than they could ever analyze,” she says. “So, you start with the question, which directs the visuals. You can decide if you are looking to describe what has happened, predict what might happen, figure out the best possible solution, or a combo of all of those with AI threaded in to tell you what you don’t know about your data.”
Prerequisites
Since Microsoft Power BI Desktop is only compatible with Windows PCs, participants are required to use a PC. An intermediate level working knowledge of Microsoft Excel also is required to get the most out of the workshops.
The next session of Dashboard in a Day Using Power BI will be 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024, while Data Visualization Using Power BI will be held Feb. 19 and 26, and March 5, 2025. Learn more and register for either online class at Daniels.du.edu/executive-education.