MICROSOFT POWER BI CASE STUDY: AN EFFICIENT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

This thesis investigates the use of MS Power BI in the case company’s heterogeneous computing environment. The empirical evidence was collected through the authors’ own observations and exposure to the modeling of dashboards, other supported external findings from interviews, published articles, academic journals, and speaking with leading experts at the WA ‘Dynamic Talks Seattle/Redmond: Big Data Analytics’ conference. Power BI modeling is effective for advancing the development of statistical thinking and data retrieving skills, finding trends and patterns in data representations, and making predictions. Computer-based data modeling gave meaning to math results, and supported examining implications of these results with simple charts to improve perception. Querying and other add-ins that would be seen as affordances when using other BI softwares, with some complexity removed in Power BI, make modeling data an easier undertaking for report builders. Using computer-based qualitative data analysis software, this paper details opportunities and challenges of data modeling with dashboards. Simple linear regression is used for case study use only.