How many kilometers of road surface and pavements do we have? What is the Current Replacement Cost of the network? What is the average Condition Rating of the Asset Classes, and when are they due to expire? How many dollars do we need to spend each year to maintain the network to the agreed service levels? Is there a backlog, if so which Assets are affected?....These are just a few questions I used to ask when I was working as an Asset Manager.
Microsoft Power BI
Data visualisations are a cool way to tell your story. I have been taking a look at Power BI for analysing Infrastructure Asset Data, and I must say I like it! Coming from a GIS and mapping background I totally believe ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and a complex idea can be conveyed more accurately with a single image than with a page full of words. When I was working as an Asset Manager within local government, I would have welcomed Power BI to help convey to our residents, elected members, and stakeholders how our Assets were performing and to assist in the development of the Asset Management Plans.
Free Download
Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that allows you to connect to many different data sources. The basic version is free to download to your desktop and has lots of functionality. I created this interactive visualisation very quickly using the free download version. The report provides in-depth information that is presented in an easy to interpret and understand format in a matter of minutes. In the past, a report like this using Excel would normally have taken me hours to create.
Tight Integration with other Microsoft Products
Power BI is a Microsoft product and, as you would expect, has tight integration with other Microsoft products such as Excel, Azure, and SQL Server and connects to most types of databases. This can be seen as a plus for Power BI as most Councils and other organisations strive to have all corporate data managed and maintained in the various corporate databases located in the one place, on the SQL Server.
View data in real-time
When the dashboards and reports are connected to live data, on the SQL Server for example, consumers of the reports will automatically view live dashboards with real time updates. As data gets processed via the many different corporate databases on the system, e.g. Finance, AMS, CRM etc, and Power BI is connected to that data source, the reports and dashboards will automatically reflect those updates and changes. This is a great timesaver and the data is always up to date. Power BI works perfectly with static data sources such as Excel, but we must remember that the dashboard and reports created from a static data source will just be a snap-shot in time, not a living document.
Opportunity to perform data checks - promote a data cleansing environment and quality assurance
As with all Systems and Applications – the result is only as good as the initial data that has been fed into it. We’ve all heard of ‘Rubbish in – Rubbish out’.
Applications like Power BI and other analytical tools that utilises the data sourced from the ‘one point of truth’ (SQL Server), not only provides us with the means to analyse our data and provide us with important information with which we can make better management decisions, but these tools can also help us to identify any inconsistencies where the data may be inaccurate, incomplete, or out-of-date.
When live interactive reports and dashboards are shared in this way all users are looking at the same data from the same data source. This promotes a cycle of data maintenance and data cleansing activity. The more the data is interrogated and used in decision making, the more the accuracy will be tested and, subsequently, the more accurate it will become because any errors will have been identified and then corrected (by the designated data owner) within the system.
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