A Brave New World
In the modern age, data is the name of the game. The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. Companies now record data at every point of interaction including with their customers, employees and regulatory bodies. The amount of data that companies continue to create is only increasing. At current estimates, 1.145 trillion megabytes of data are created every day. That amounts to every human on the planet creating 1.7 megabytes per second!
But what is driving this trend? Why do businesses go to the trouble of collecting so much data, especially when the cost of data storage is increasing?
Data is, at its essence, information. Good data allows you to draw conclusions and make smart decisions. Anecdotal evidence, assumptions and beliefs based on observation are fraught with human bias and often incorrect. Data, on the other hand, is objective and unambiguous; conclusions drawn from them are far more accurate. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding of the market, see larger trends,improve your marketing strategy, expand your customer database and allows for greater consumer personalization.
There is a problem, however. Data does not become useful on its own. Insight must be squeezed from it like juice from a lemon. Interpretations and deductions can only be gleaned if the data is understood and synthesized.
This is where software tools can help. They allow enterprises to record, parse through and, finally, represent data in a digestible manner. Thus edified, decision makers and stakeholders can make vastly more informed decisions.
The Power Platform
The ‘Power Platform’ is a collection of four products offered by Microsoft: Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate and Virtual Agents. They are data manipulations tools, allowing businesses and individuals to collect and utilize data in simple and unchallenging ways. Since they integrate directly with Microsoft’s widely used Office 365 and Dynamics 365 suite, they have become among the most popular data tools in the world.
PowerApps
PowerApps is Microsoft’s low code tool to create mobile applications. You can use its intuitive drag and drop features to build a user interface that can be constructed to record data easier.
You can utilize its intuitive configuration to build user interfaces that make data recording easier. Choose from among a wide variety of user elements like textboxes, choice fields, drop down menus and more by utilizing its simple drag and drop feature.
PowerApps also has features that allow the incorporation of media devices like camera, videos etc to build a fully functional mobile application. It integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft Power Platform, making data capture and analytics considerably easier. Power BI integration with PowerApps is especially handy, combining both capture and analysis.
Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate was formerly known as Microsoft flow. Its name is self explanatory; Power Automate allows you to automate repetitive tasks and common workflows within your organizations without needing any coding knowledge. It frees up hands that were previously occupied by manual tasks and increases efficiency and productivity within your organization. As examples, you can automate tasks as simple as sending an email once a task is completed and as complex as automating leave policies within the organization.
Power BI
Power BI is the tool that deals with business analysis. It helps you understand and gain insight from the data your organization collects. Power BI can connect to many different data sources, import data into its data model and use its wide range of tools and functionality to transform this data into visual forms. Data from sales, profit, customer service, marketing or any other operation can be illustrated by all manner of graphs.
These representations are much more comprehensible than the raw data, and can thus facilitate decision making within the company through storytelling, forecasts, predictions, pre-mortems and more.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual agents is a newer addition to the Microsoft Power suite of apps. Virtual agents allow you to build chatbots, from dialog creation to third party deployment in channels like skype, whatsapp, teams, slack etc. all without needing to write a single line of code. You can also integrate it with Power Automate, triggering specific workflows based on a user’s reply, completing entire tasks with minimal effort.
The Power Platform connects to a wide range of data sources – including third-party apps such as Google Analytics and Twitter. But the best part of the collection is perhaps how easily it connects to Office 365 and Dynamics 365, 2 suites of apps that are used by the vast majority of businesses and organizations. Microsoft pitch the Power Platform as a way to “unlock the potential of Dynamics 365 and Office 365 faster than you ever thought possible”.
The Microsoft Power Platform is an extremely powerful group of apps that many enterprises turn to for their business data solutions. It’s the ultimate data tool, allowing you to collect, automate and visualize data in powerful ways.