In today's fast-paced and data-driven world, local governments face the growing challenge of how to make sense of vast amounts of data and turn it into actionable insights that can drive better decision-making and improve public services.
This is where Power BI comes in!
Welcome to the Iamdata Solutions Asset Management Monthly Newsletter - 1 August 2023
What is Power BI?
Power BI Desktop is a powerful business intelligence tool developed by Microsoft that enables users to create interactive and visually compelling data reports and dashboards. One of its great advantages is that it allows users to connect to various data sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, and cloud services, and transform the raw data into meaningful insights. Users can build meaningful data visualisation from a wide range of customisable charts, graphs, and tables. Power BI Desktop also provides advanced features like DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) which is invaluable for complex calculations and measures. For easy sharing and collaboration of your Power BI reports, there is Power BI services.
Sounds great doesn't it! I'm a huge fan of Power BI and I love how it can help us with our day-to-day work.
Analysing Financial Data
One of the ways in which local governments are using Power BI is to improve their financial management. By integrating financial data from multiple sources, including budgets, expenditures, and revenue, we can gain a comprehensive view of our financial performance and identify areas where we can cut costs or where we may have to increase budgets. Analysing the data can help us increase efficiency.
Service Delivery
Power BI can help us improve our service delivery by tracking service requests and analysing related data. We can use Power BI to identify trends, monitor service levels, and determine areas where improvements are needed. For example, Power BI can be used to track complaints about potholes and identify the locations where the most complaints are coming from, which will help us prioritise repair work and ensure sufficient budgets are in place.
Planning and Development
Power BI can help us make informed decisions relating to planning and development in the council area by analysing data related to population growth, infrastructure development, and land use. We can identify areas that require more investment and prioritise projects accordingly.
Community Engagement
Power BI is also proving to be a valuable tool for community engagement and communication. We can create interactive dashboards and reports that can be published and shared on the council's website - ensuring that no sensitive data is available in the public facing Power BI reports. As providing a transparent view of their operations and engage residents in a more meaningful way.
Public Safety
Power BI can help enhance public safety by analysing data from various sources such as crime statistics, emergency response times, traffic patterns, rainfall, demographics data, and air quality to name but a few!
We can use Power BI to analyse this data sourced from outside our organisation together with our own data to help us identify areas that may require more careful planning to help alleviate some of the issues identified through the analysis.
Power BI is transforming the way we operate and interact with our communities. Power BI can help to analyse specific data effectively which can assist with improving financial management, improve public services and community engagement, and help us to make better decisions based on data-driven insights.
So, if you are in local government and looking to harness the power of your data, it is perhaps time to unleash the power of Power BI!
I have worked on many different projects with my Local Government clients, from designing and developing Power BI Reports, to building SQL Server databases for spatial data, to managing and maintaining the GIS and the Asset Management systems. If you'd like to discuss how we might work together, then please email me at ➡️ jill.singleton@iamdata.solutions
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