The days of reactive reporting are fleeting, replaced by proactive, real-time responsiveness suitable for today’s volatile business environment. For workloads spread across a diverse range of departments and geographies, real-time insights and reactivity are even more crucial.
Johnny Jay, principal product marketing manager, insightsoftware, and Evan Friel, senior solutions engineer, insightsoftware, joined DBTA’s webinar, Unlocking Real-Time Write Back Applications in Power BI, to explore how Power ON—a solution for visual planning for Microsoft Power BI–delivers the advanced write back, planning, and forecasting capabilities necessary for future-proofing business operations without sacrificing data integrity or governance.
Jay began by contextualizing the webinar and the significance of write back, explaining how, while BI tools excel at visualizing and analyzing data, they have not typically allowed users to directly input changes. With write back, “it fundamentally changes your data architecture by introducing control bi-directional data flow,” transforming BI tools from passive tools to active platforms for planning, collaboration, and data exploration.
Write back “allows you to capture your business processes in one place and provide native data entry interfaces that integrate seamlessly within your existing Power BI structure,” said Jay, paired with enterprise-grade security and control.
But why does write back matter? According to Jay, it solves a variety of common business challenges, including:
- The increasing cost of bad data
- Slow decision-making
- Poor data security and governance
- Manual data entry
- Poor collaboration
This is accomplished by enabling real-time data correction and validation at the source, eliminating the issues of poor data quality while accelerating data flow with immediate data updates. Ultimately, write back-powered solutions integrate within existing governing frameworks to bridge gaps in BI data quality, security, and collaboration.
It’s more than just improving data entry, said Jay, capable of being used for:
- Editing, validating, and updating data
- Data enrichment
- Scenario modeling and what-if scenarios
- Planning and forecasting
- Data governance
- Data commentary
Friel then led webinar viewers through a demo of the Power ON toolset, which enhances Microsoft Power BI by adding planning and write back capabilities.
This is only a snippet of the full Unlocking Real-Time Write Back Applications in Power BI webinar. For the full webinar, featuring more detailed explanations, use cases, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.