The True Cost of Ownership of Power BI
There is no doubt that Microsoft Power BI is very powerful tool for providing ad-hoc data analytics and comprehensive data visualisations. However, the leap from clever reports being created by one or two accomplished users in a law firm, normally sat within the finance and/or IT teams, to a robust firmwide business intelligence/management information platform is significant.
Trying to provide an enterprise class BI/MI platform through Power BI comes with many hidden costs. These range from development, time to solution through domain expertise and ultimately the ongoing costs to support a custom and bespoke solution.
These hidden costs can be categorised in the following ways;
Product
1. A lack of data warehouse or business rules engine to sanitise the underlying data.
2. Each dashboard/report has to be custom built
3. Workflow and notification functionality has to be configured
Development
1. Customer built solutions take longer to deliver.
2. These solutions are never really complete.
3. Not know best practice and the potential pitfalls.
4. The ongoing development costs via internal or 3rd party resources can be high.
People/Support
1. In-house staff are frequently required to support and maintain the service.
2. A key business risk is that often only one person knows how to maintain the service.
3. There is an opportunity cost to other projects/initiatives as it is normally finance &/or IT teams that look after the Power BI environment.
In short this is the classic buy versus build argument, and with Power BI whilst the initial costs look much more appealing to the purchase of an enterprise BI solution such as Katchr, when all of the hidden costs are factored in, the true total cost of ownership is very different. Below is an illustration of how the Power BI firmwide to provide BI/MI information costs significantly more than the deployment of Katchr.
Through Katchr, firms have access to a robust BI/MI service used by nearly 100 law firms in the UK and can benefit from domain experience of the Katchr team, best practice methodologies and new enhancements/upgrades all within a single annual licence fee.
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