Power BI has quickly become the tool of choice for LA performance teams wanting to present data to their stakeholders in informative and user-friendly ways, and KEY Intelligence is often called upon to assist with its introduction and implementation.
In the most recent case, we were asked to create demonstration dashboards for 23 KPIs across a London Children’s department, a task that would normally be ‘grist to the mill’ but was complicated here by a lack of background data.
The information we were asked to present was to be drawn from a summary spreadsheet, produced monthly and manually, with no direct automated links to the case management system. While we could see the ‘score’ against the various measures at Borough level, there was nothing to show where those numbers came from, and so nothing to really show the user benefits of Power BI. While we could see how many children had experienced a particular intervention in the past month, for example, we had no clue as to who those children were, where they lived, their history, or the care worker and team to which they were assigned. The ability to drill-through and look at deeper information from a number of perspectives, to identify clusters, and spot trends, is a crucial value-add of Power BI, so to have nothing to drill through to would not give the client the demonstration they were hoping for.
So, to ensure that the Client received the best introduction to the strengths and capabilities of both Power BI and KEY Intelligence, our analysts took the time to create a fictional dataset that would generate the precise KPI scores that we had received on the one-dimensional spreadsheet. Now every item had a back-story, as an event in the life of a child who has a date of birth, an address, an allocated social worker, an ethnicity, and a history of other events and interventions.
The demonstration dashboard now gives a realistic representation of what could be done if it were linked directly to the CRM dataset. The user can click on any item and easily drill through into layers of meaningful and purposeful, albeit in this case fictional, information, that is sure to prompt further enquiry – Why do so many cases occur in those two streets, or among children from a single school? Why is this team repeatedly missing that target? Why do so many children experience this event at that age? - and so lead to targeted action. The team here at KEY Intelligence are now eager for the chance to link Power BI to real live data and show how much we can improve the depth and quality of information reaching the department’s decision-makers.
