The launch of Power BI, a powerful new tool for departments to view their data and build reports, is under way. Power BI has been in the works for many months, as we have been using it to build reports, replacing and improving on existing reports and queries, while we stabilize the architecture.
We provided access to the initial Power BI dashboards to FISCal’s partner agencies – the Department of General Services, State Treasurer’s Office, State Controller’s Office and Department of Finance – and to FISCal’s accounting staff – at the beginning of July. Moving forward, we plan to quickly roll out these dashboards to the nine or so departments from our Customer Impact Committee BI Working Group, with other departments following soon.
The first two available dashboards are a budget-to-actuals report and a replacement for the DFQ_KK12 query in PeopleSoft. FI$Cal will build and provide access to additional dashboards over time.
We know that the use of data-backed visualization is a key way that departments can explore, analyze and report their own insights and trends from data. The Power BI tool ultimately will be able to connect users to a wide range of data sources and allow them to create reports faster and with greater clarity and creativity.
Look for more information to come over the next month, including a special series of articles on data. We look forward to providing the Power BI tool and working with departments to help them make better use of their information.