The Power BI ecosystem is diverse and can be implemented in different ways.
Welcome to the Iamdata Solutions Asset Management Monthly Newsletter - January 2023
In my experience, this seems to be the most common turn of events that leads to an organisation embracing and rolling out Power BI. The scenario is usually something like this…. a few people in the organisation downloaded the free Power BI Desktop and have spent time learning how they can use it to help them solve their immediate data problems. After some time, others around them start to realise the benefits that Power BI can bring, and more and more people have downloaded the free Power BI Desktop and are learning how to use it to help them answer questions and make data driven decisions in their day-to-day work. Does this sound familiar to you?
This is great – I absolutely love Power BI and I definitely think all organisations who use vast amounts of data to help drive evidence-based decisions will benefit from utilising Power BI.
But, without a doubt, your business will reap more rewards if you have a clear data strategy that will help you effectively deploy and develop Power BI as an enterprise data tool across your organisation.
5 Tips to help you on your Power BI Implementation Journey
1. Have a Solid Plan: Just like any good adventure, you need a solid plan to successfully roll out Power BI. Make sure you have a clear understanding of your goals and what you want to achieve with Power BI. This will help guide your implementation and ensure success. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind as you plan:
Define your goals: What do you want to achieve with Power BI? Are you looking to improve decision making, streamline processes, or provide insights to stakeholders? Understanding your goals will help guide your implementation and ensure success.
Identify your target audience: Who will be using Power BI? Understanding your target audience will help you tailor your training and support efforts to their specific needs.
Assess your data: Power BI is only as good as the data it's working with. Assess the quality and availability of your data and identify any gaps that need to be filled. This will help ensure your Power BI implementation is successful.
Plan your timeline: When do you want to roll out Power BI? How long do you anticipate the implementation will take? Having a clear timeline will help you stay on track and ensure a successful rollout.
Establish a budget: Implementing Power BI as an enterprise system will incur some costs, so it's important to establish a budget and allocate resources accordingly. This will help you avoid overspending and ensure the success of your implementation.
2. Find a Power BI Champion(s): You need someone to lead the charge and be the face of Power BI in your organisation. If you are a large organisation, you may have several Power BI Champions. This person / people should be knowledgeable about Power BI and passionate about its potential to drive business insights. They will play a crucial role in the success of your Power BI rollout, so it's important to choose wisely. Here are some key characteristics to look for in a Power BI champion:
Knowledgeable about Power BI: The Power BI champion should have a strong understanding of the platform and its capabilities. They should be able to answer questions and provide guidance to other users.
Passionate about the potential of Power BI: The Power BI champion should be enthusiastic about the potential of Power BI to drive business insights and improve decision making.
Good communicator: The Power BI champion should be a good communicator and able to explain complex concepts in a way that is easy for others to understand.
Collaborative: The Power BI champion should be able to work well with others and be able to build partnerships with key stakeholders in your organisation.
3. Provide Training and Support: Your Power BI implementation will only be as successful as the people using it. Make sure you provide training and support to help your employees get up to speed and feel confident using Power BI. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind as you plan your training and support efforts:
Tailor training to your audience: Make sure your training is tailored to the needs of your target audience. Consider using a variety of training methods, such as in-person training, online tutorials, and hands-on exercises.
Provide ongoing support: Power BI is a complex platform, so it's important to provide ongoing support to your users. This can include regular check-ins, access to a support hotline, or regular training sessions.
Encourage collaboration: Encourage collaboration between your users to promote knowledge sharing and best practices. This can include creating a community of practice, hosting regular user groups, or encouraging peer-to-peer support. I actually think this is sometimes the best way to learn Power BI in the beginning.
Encourage feedback: Encourage your users to provide feedback on their experience with Power BI. This will help you identify areas for improvement and ensure that your training and support efforts are effective.
4. Establish Governance and Security: Establishing governance and security are critical components of a successful Power BI rollout. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind as you establish governance and securit
Define roles and responsibilities: Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each member of your Power BI team to ensure accountability and minimise confusion.
Set data and security policies: Set clear data and security policies to ensure that sensitive information is protected and that data is used appropriately.
Monitor usage: Monitor usage of Power BI to ensure that it is being used effectively and in accordance with your policies.
Keep Power BI up-to-date: Regularly update Power BI to ensure that it is secure and that you are taking advantage of the latest features and capabilities.
By establishing governance and security measures, you'll help ensure the success of your Power BI implementation and minimize the risk of data breaches or misuse.
5. Build a Culture of Adoption: It is important to create a culture of adoption within your organisation. Encourage your employees to use Power BI and share their insights. The more people using Power BI, the more value it will bring to your organisation. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind as you foster a culture of adoption:
Encourage Power BI use: Encourage your users to use Power BI and make it a part of their daily routine. This can include setting up regular Power BI reports, promoting the use of Power BI dashboards, and incentivising Power BI adoption.
Emphasise the business value: Emphasise the business value of Power BI and how it can help users make better decisions. Showcase the insights that Power BI provides and how it can improve processes and workflows.
Celebrate successes: Celebrate the successes of your Power BI implementation and recognise the contributions of your users. This will help build momentum and encourage continued adoption.
Continuously promote Power BI: Continuously promote Power BI and its capabilities to ensure that it remains top of mind for your users. This can include hosting events, sharing success stories, and providing ongoing training and support.
By fostering a culture of adoption, you'll help ensure that your Power BI implementation is successful and that your users are getting the most out of the platform.
If you follow these steps and make use of the resources provided by Microsoft I mention in the following pages, you will undoubtedly succeed in Implementing Power BI as an Enterprise system within your organisation.
Effectively deploy and develop Power BI within your organisation as an Enterprise System.
Microsoft recognised that many businesses are at this point in their Power BI journey. These businesses are now looking to roll out Power BI in a more planned and structured way within their organisation. To help you successfully achieve this, Microsoft have written very detailed and helpful documents on the subject. I also found a whole series of videos created by Microsoft that walks you through the various stages of the Power BI implementation.
It is rather revolutionary the way Power BI gets implemented organisation wide and very different to most IT software implementations. Where Power BI differs enormously is that it has been adopted and used by the individual within the organisation and it is being pushed upwards. The documentation provided by Microsoft focuses on supporting this self-service BI activities model in which analytical responsibilities are handled by people throughout many areas of the organisation.
Microsoft Power BI Adoption Roadmap
As I mentioned, Power BI is rather revolutionary (in more ways than one!), and you will have to tailor the rollout to match your business requirements. This is where Microsoft’s Power BI Adoption Roadmap documentation can really help you.
The documentation provides actual implementation requirements for each scenario, including detailing the various components needed and how to do each piece correctly to get it implemented.
The most prevalent components of Power BI are identified in each scenario based on how Power BI is intended to be used for that scenario. The objective is not to call out every possible option for each usage scenario. Rather, each scenario diagram depicts the primary features that are most relevant for that scenario. You can mix and match too, you may be somewhere between Personal BI and Team BI, for example. You can use the information provided to tailor it to your organisation’s requirements.
The Scenarios
Use the scenarios to help you with Power BI architecture planning and implementation decisions. Here are some suggestions from Microsoft:
Initially read the scenarios in the order they are documented. Become familiar with the concepts and how the scenarios build upon each other.
Focus on the scenarios that align well with your data culture. Also consider how content ownership and management is handled, as well as content delivery scope when determining which usage scenarios are a good fit.
Consider which areas of your BI operations could be strengthened in your organization. For example, if your goal is to reduce the level of data duplication, focus on the managed self-service BI scenario. If your goal is to improve efficiency of data preparation efforts, focus on the self-service data preparation scenario.
Determine if there are ways to use Power BI that will bring additional value or reduce risk for your organization. For example, if your goal is to achieve a balance between centralization and decentralization (described further in the content ownership and management articles), consider the customizable managed self-service BI scenario.
After understanding the areas of your BI operations that you want to implement or strengthen, create a project plan that defines tactical steps to arrive at your desired future state.
Content collaboration and delivery scenarios
The following usage scenarios are about content collaboration and delivery. These initial four scenarios focus primarily on content ownership and management, and content delivery scope. They are inter-related, building upon each other in a way that aligns with how business intelligence teams evolve and grow over time. They can be thought of as the building blocks that other scenarios build upon—particularly the self-service BI scenarios that are described in the next section. Therefore, it's a good idea to review those scenarios first.
The scenarios include:
Personal BI: The content creator has a lot of freedom and flexibility to create content for individual usage. This scenario describes using a personal workspace for private usage.
Team BI: The primary focus is on informal collaboration among team members who work closely together on a team. This scenario describes using a workspace for both collaboration and distribution. It also showcases the value of using Microsoft Teams for collaboration between Power BI creators and consumers.
Departmental BI: There's a focus on distributing content to a larger number of users within a department or business unit. This scenario describes using a Power BI app for distributing content.
Enterprise BI: The primary focus is on content distribution at scale. This scenario describes using Premium capacity to distribute content to a larger number of read-only consumers who have a Power BI free license.
Self-service BI scenarios
Four usage scenarios focus on supporting self-service BI activities, in which analytical responsibilities are handled by people throughout many areas of the organization. The content collaboration and delivery scenarios (described in the previous group of scenarios) also include aspects of self-service BI but from a slightly different viewpoint. The intention of this set of scenarios is to focus on several important aspects to plan for in a Power BI implementation.
The self-service BI scenarios presented here primarily emphasize the use of managed self-service BI in which data management is centralized. Reusability of this centralized data is one of the primary goals. Business users take responsibility for creation of reports and dashboards.
Managed self-service BI: The goal is for many report creators to reuse shared datasets. This scenario describes decoupling the report creation process from the dataset creation process. To encourage report authors to find and reuse an existing shared dataset, it should be endorsed and made discoverable in the data hub in the Power BI service.
Customizable managed self-service BI: The focus is on the dataset creator customizing or extending an existing dataset to satisfy new requirements. This scenario describes publishing a customized data model where some tables are new while others are dependent on the existing shared dataset.
Self-service data preparation: The focus is on centralizing data preparation activities to improve consistency and reduce effort. This scenario describes creating Power BI dataflows to avoid repeating data preparation Power Query logic in many different Power BI Desktop files. A dataflow can be consumed as a data source by numerous datasets.
Advanced data preparation: The focus is on improving the reach and reusability of dataflows for multiple users, teams, and use cases. This scenario describes use of multiple workspaces based on purpose: staging, cleansed, and final.
Prototyping and sharing: Prototyping techniques are very useful for validating requirements for visuals and calculations by subject matter experts. Prototyping solutions may be temporary, short-lived solutions, or they may ultimately evolve into a solution that's fully validated and released. This scenario describes using Power BI Desktop during an interactive prototyping session. It's followed by sharing in the Power BI service when additional feedback is needed from a subject matter expert.
Additional information about content ownership and management, and content delivery scope, which affect self-service BI activities and decisions, are described in the Power BI adoption roadmap.
Build an Inclusive Data Culture
Perhaps one of the most important elements for success in any software implementation is to build an inclusive data culture within the business. Let’s put aside all the engineering and architecture that is required to implement a new software and think about what we want the end state to look like inside the business in order to transform the business and deliver value.
Microsoft has listed Data Culture as number 1 in the Power BI Adoption Roadmap, and I totally agree. Having an engaged and empowered workforce is the key to successfully implementing any IT strategy / system / procedure.
Useful Links:
Power BI adoption roadmap - tells you how to adopt Power BI and how to roll it out to your organisation with best practices. It provides several scenarios and explains what you need for each scenario. Content ownership and management
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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