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The Right Tool For The Job - making sense of data PowerBI rocks!

The Right Tool For The Job

The Right Tool For The Job

TRTFTJ - Launching a new Acronym - post 2 of 2
 

Productivity - a buzz word on every Office Worker's mind these days.

I'm in the thick of it - people working in offices, warehouses and the likes, all stressed about 'getting the job done'. Picking the right tool, and making the most of collaborative environments and attitude - yes attitude! is an important step towards better Productivity. And keep the goal in mind; It's about the best outcome for the Business, not the individual!

There's so much we can do right now, don't wait for the all fixing magic bullet, take action right now.

So you are a business owner and you know, there's tons of data stored away and obscured by complex applications - Reporting is in-flexible and often requires IT people to configure or customize to produce the answers to the questions you have today, just because they are different from the needs you had when the system was purchased and installed.

A costly exercise, that is if the vendor still exists, supports and has the resources available at short notice, this alone can be a challenge these days.

Introducing: Self Service Business Intelligence! Do yourself a huge favor and get to know your data, understand where things are stored, how to access them and once you have that power, create models that meet your needs now and in the future.

It sounds complicated, but the good news is Microsoft has made it really easy, after reading this post, take an hour out of your day to get your head around the Microsoft PowerBI tools - I guarantee a return on that investment within a day or so and after a few weeks you won't know what it's like to live without it.

Your starting point is here

 

Take a moment to scroll down this site and look at some of the quick videos, trust me you'll be inspired. Once that's done, download and install the latest PowerBI Designer - and let me give you a quick getting started tip. Don't get distracted by wondering how to connect to your company data sources just yet. You have or can easily create some Excel spreadsheets with lots of data you are likely to be pretty familiar with.

Start with using those as a data source and get to know the power of the designer; there a tremendous amount of help and videos already available on-line

It's easy to get lost in the options; in my opinion you should start with a  simple excel data source (a .csv file will do), create a report with the PowerBI designer and then go into the PowerBI.com environment to load the report you created and play around with the Dashboard functionality. From there you can save and share the results with anyone in your organization and quickly become the BI hero!

I kid you not you won't believe how easy this is, and how much this enables you and you co-workers to make much more sense of data in ways you've never had imagined.

Microsoft PowerBI is a cornerstone to the Reporting and Dash boarding solutions we deliver at Hedgehog Technology, a solutions provider for the logistics industry  on a mission to transform the businesses of our customers.

 

TRTFTJ Series post 1 of 2

The Right Tool For The Job

The Right Tool For The Job

TRTFTJ - Launching a new Acronym today post 1 of 2
 

Productivity - a buzz word on every Office Worker's mind these days.

I'm in the thick of it - people working in offices, warehouses and the likes, all stressed about 'getting the job done'. Picking the right tool, and making the most of collaborative environments and attitude - yes attitude! is an important step towards better Productivity. And keep the goal in mind; It's about the best outcome for the Business, not the individual!

There's so much we can do right now, don't wait for the all fixing magic bullet, take action right now.

I'll start posting examples of TRT - The Right Tool - from now on, on this blog as I'm convinced business who embrace collaboration and innovative tools - challenge the status quo - will be the businesses making money and thriving in the connected world we live in.
 

Most of these examples will be based on real life observations - but I'll try to protect the innocent - if you do recognize yourself don't feel bad, feel privileged by the opportunity to contribute and inspire improvement and productivity!

 

The topic of today - FILES

I witnessed an email conversation yesterday - a topic for another post, our stubborn reliance on this ancient, inefficient way of communicating - here's this developer that realised a team member would need a source file. In this example a JavaScript file (.js) and he decided to attach it to an email and send it - a noble thought. Sadly Outlook blocks certain file types, .js being one of them and so the recipient mailed back that he cold not save the file, and requested the sender to go and rename the file and re-send it....  Now that you read it and think about it, you can probably see how much time was wasted and a number of ways this could have been avoided.

First of all what's the file doing in a local place?, that requires copying and mailing. And why use email?, don't we have Lync, Twitter, Yammer as examples of much better ways to 'share' the information. It's very likely you know that someone else in the team will face the same issue and might need the same file - or use it as a basis for solving his problem. Using a more open, social platform allows that transparency between team members and creates an automatic history of what problem was resolved, and how. Very valuable information that will certainly save someone else time in the future. I'm sure you can think of many examples just like this.

The same is true for many business documents, as soon as they are sent out via email, they are by definition stale, how many times have you sent out 'updates' , reviews, and had to consolidate changes to a "master" version? And still do?
 

The obvious solution is to create a central place, in this day and age clearly in "The Cloud" where the life of a file starts and ends - and stakeholders can collaborate, manage alerts and access the information from anywhere, on any device. Add to that the powerful capabilities to search and do things like version management and set permissions and you wonder "Why don't we do that for all our files?" Don't be inert and start the transformation process right now!
 

Office 365 file sharing is a great way to get started and "The Right Tool For The Job" for the above scenario or even OneDrive for Business is a great way to be more productive.

One closing thought, the above tools work great inside your business boundaries, but also provide easy options to work with external parties - so no excuses - no more sharing PDF's over email. you can have real collaboration, with added enterprise security at a very low cost of entry.
 

If you want to know more, feel free to contact Hedgehog Technology for guidance and advice on becoming more Agile, more Productive and "Getting The Job Done".

 

 

"Work the way the Cloud works - A-Synchronously "

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