VIDEO: David McCandless, renowned data journalist and speaker, uses the world’s data to create powerful and provocative data visualizations and stories with Office.
PTI presents this executive summary that outlines the results of the State of City and County IT 2015: The IT Organization and Operations national survey.
In August, 2015 local government technology executives representing cities and counties of all sizes were asked to respond to the survey.
Highlights from the 2015 survey:
47% of the IT executives who responded to the survey stated that their local government IT department budgets will remain the same over the next year.
How much value does "Big Data" have for local government operations? 31% of survey participants responded that Big Data would become increasingly important (up from 27% in 2014 and 18% in 2013).
New to the survey in 2015 - Cloud Adoption - where 69% of all respondents stated that the cloud is important to their disaster recovery and COOP operations.
Tech trends that will enable “what’s next” for cities
Microsoft CityNext puts a city’s people first, harnessing their ideas, energy, and expertise to create more sustainable and safer place to live, with access to citizen-centric services and quality healthcare and education. Microsoft CityNext solutions, alliances and programs can help governments, businesses, and citizens shape the future of their regions, cities and municipalities. Microsoft is uniquely equipped to enable this approach. No other company offers as broad a portfolio of secure, consumer-to-business software, devices, and services; as diverse a network of global partners to implement it all; and as extensive a history of successful education and social programs. In combination, all of this helps cities imagine and realize what’s next for their people.
While many cities are already well on their way toward modernizing their technology infrastructures, they will continue to face growing challenges as migration trends rise and citizen demands for public safety and other services increase. Microsoft CityNext is the bridge to help them meet these challenges in a phased approach, now and into the future.
Working together, Microsoft and our partners can provide cities with highly integrated solutions that will focus the most important technology trends — cloud, Big Data, mobile, and social — on their most pressing issues.
The latest release of Power BI gives us a great opportunity to look at how some smart folks in the industry view the latest trends in business intelligence. Here are five ones you should know:
BI for everyone
BI used to be the sole province of data experts in IT or information analyst specialists. Now the move is toward democratizing the access and analysis of data across the organization. Today, a data analyst could be a product manager, a line-of-business executive, or a sales director. Browser-based analytics now enable business users themselves to answer impromptu questions that are relevant to their expertise, and then create sophisticated visualizations to share with others. More companies are recognizing BI for everyone as a strategic advantage. They’re supporting business users with tools to help empower them as data analysts.
What better tool for empowering business users than Power BI? With features that simplify accessing datasets, creating visualizations, and sharing reports, Power BI enables users to integrate data analysis in their work, whatever their role. When everyone can run analyses, amazing insights and discoveries can happen.
Self-service analytics
Industry analysts now predict that within two years, most business users in organizations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis. Such self-service BI solutions can transform business users from data consumers to active data analysts, reducing the time and complexity of data gathering and preparation, and shifting the monopoly on data extraction, processing, and visualization from IT to a model of data analysis across the organization.
Power BI is a complete self-service data analysis tool available right now, enabling all users to make smart decisions with data. Connect with ease to internal data sources and external data services, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and QuickBooks. Process data with drag-and-drop gestures. Use natural language to query datasets and create compelling visualizations. And share your reports with colleagues using content packs. Power BI is at the forefront of tools that help cultivate and strengthen data-savvy knowledge workers.
Real-time analytics
Static reports are giving way to interactive presentations. Interactivity enables business users to explore and answer questions with data updated in real time. Monitoring the latest data helps decision makers respond with accuracy and agility.
With Power BI you’re no longer limited to static presentations. Include real-time data slides in your business presentations. Explore data interactively and flexibly to answer critical business questions on-the-fly. Refresh data in reports and presentations with real-time updates, helping speed insights, and drive faster, informed decision-making.
Data integration
Increases in data volume, velocity, and variety is fueling a trend toward comprehensive BI solutions that process information from multiple sources and in multiple views. Massive amounts of data are now available from disparate sources, increasing the demand for rapid data source integration accessible through simple interfaces.
Businesses are drawing upon huge volumes of unstructured social data to gain insights into customer behavior. Tracking social conversations at scale enables companies to learn when a topic is trending and what their customers are talking about. Insights gleaned from social data analytics lead to responsive optimization of products and services.
Power BI gives business users across the organization an easy-to-use tool to tap into insights hidden in large amounts of data. Whether the data reside in the cloud or on-premises, in structured databases or unstructured data processed by Hadoop, it’s accessible through Power BI. Use the Power BI visualization tools to communicate social trends to colleagues. As social trends evolve, have real-time updates reflected in your visualizations, enabling more agile responses to emerging market changes.
Mobile BI
The workforce is more mobile than ever, and mobile solutions for data analytics are maturing. Knowledge workers can now access and analyze data from their mobile devices more readily than ever. The trend toward mobile BI solutions will only continue to accelerate.
Power BI enables you to access and modify your dashboards no matter where you are, using touch-enabled native apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Use the Power BI app to connect to your data, discover insights easily with data alerts, and share them with your team. The Power BI app also enables you to filter and pivot your data in different ways to quickly find answers on the go through your mobile device.
These trends point to the evolution of BI toward making new sources of information accessible, consumable, and meaningful to organizations of all sizes, including those that do not have advanced analytics skills or in-house resources.
The demand for self-service BI tools will spread to more businesses. The increase in big data means more organizations want broadly deployable, easy-to-use, and often cloud-based technologies for query, analysis, and reporting. Emerging data preparation capabilities now let business users extend self-service to information access, management, and data visualization, enabling them to prepare, integrate, curate, model, and enrich data that’s shareable with colleagues and stakeholders.
Microsoft Makes Small Businesses ‘Data Smart’ With Power BI
By David Smith, General Manager of Worldwide SMB as written on Microsoft for Work.
Despite being the buzzword de jour for large enterprises, the concept of “Big Data” is still in its infancy with small businesses. This is because the process of capturing, storing, extracting and analyzing large quantities of data always required far too much in the way of IT resources and technical expertise for the average SMB. But just because SMBs don’t want to maintain servers, hire data scientists and pay for expensive analytics suites doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from business insights hiding in their own data.
Today Microsoft is releasing a new business analytics service designed to help the non-data-scientists among us uncover those insights and make more informed decisions about their business. It’s called Power BI, and it gives people working for companies small and large a straightforward way to analyze and visualize their information.
Power BI Brings It All Together
At its core, Power BI is a centralized hub that allows users to easily pull in, visualize and interpret the vast amount of data that their business generates on a daily basis. SMBs use a wide range of tools and services to run the different aspects of their business. By generating unified charts, graphs, maps and statistics, Power BI allows users to spot trends that would be difficult or impossible to identify by looking at an unorganized assortment of different spreadsheets and dashboards.
The greatest analytics tool on the planet is worthless if it doesn’t provide a simple and reliable way to connect with the information that matters to your small business, which is why we created content packs for Power BI. Content packs provide a way to automatically bring together data from different sources so the full picture can be analyzed in one place. And these connections extend beyond services like Excel or Dynamics CRM, so even if an SMB uses Google Analytics to track website traffic, MailChimp for email marketing campaigns and QuickBooks Online for accounting and payroll they can grab and analyze all of that data instantly (you can find the expanding list of content packs here).
We also know that small businesses aren’t always run from behind a desk. With Power BI apps for Windows, iOS and Android, users can view personalized dashboards and reports anywhere, interacting with their data in a touch-optimized experience.
Power of Data for Small Business
Say you’re the owner of a small online retail shop and you want to run a flash sale on a certain product to a specific set of customers. To do this effectively you need to have access to data that depicts your customer set to gather demographic information, online traffic that shows your most active customers, likely times to buy and historical sales data that shows you what worked well and what didn’t with the last flash sale you ran. Imagine if rather than searching each data set in its respective location and digging through everything manually, you could view all the information in one simple dashboard that illustrates trends and easy-to-spot insights, enabling fast and informed decisions about when to run the sale and who to market it to.
Best of all, you don’t need to learn a whole new set of skills to use Power BI. Power BI uses natural language query technology, which allows you to ask a question like “show me sales data from January to July.” In other words, you don’t need to be a data scientist to get at the information you need.
How Small Businesses Can Use Power BI
We’re often expounding the virtues of the cloud for small businesses because it provides the benefits of large-scale IT without the cost and complexity. Power BI is a fantastic example of exactly how the cloud is leveling the technology playing field for businesses of all sizes. A few years ago this type of solution would have been out of reach for just about every SMB. Now it can be set up in minutes with no up-front costs, making data analytics viable for even a single-person business. In fact, much of the functionality is available for free, without trial period restrictions.
Removing the price and technical hurdles means that many more small businesses will be able to capitalize on the value of analytics as a competitive tool and point of differentiation. Putting your data to use can give you a leg up on your competition. You’ll have real-time insights that allow you to adjust and adapt your business plan, so you can stay focused on what’s really driving results for your company. Basing your decisions on data not only helps you act strategically but allows you to be more in touch with your customer needs.
As an SMB, you have a lot on your plate already and exerting unnecessary time mining through endless data across multiple platforms doesn’t need to be one of them. Power BI makes your life easier and allows you to become more nimble and efficient, ultimately driving more results for your business.
About Pinterest
Pinterest is no stranger to rapid growth, expanding from 50,000 users to 17 million in 9 months. Now at 48 million users, Pinterest was able to scale its business because it was built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With a company of fewer than 12 employees, Pinterest didn’t want to dedicate staff time to managing a data center. Instead, Pinterest uses AWS to manage a high-performance social application that stores more than 8 billion objects and 400 terabytes of data in the AWS Cloud using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and 225,000 instance hours a month with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
