Power BI lets business users solve more and more problems without requiring deep BI and data expertise. This is what self-service business intelligence is all about, as we saw when we looked at a brief history of business intelligence.
At other points in this series we also looked at how each app needs to be treated like the unique snowflake that it is, that successful data cultures have well-defined roles and responsibilities, and that sometimes you need to pick your battles and realize that some apps and data don’t need the management and care that others do.
But some apps do.
Some BI solutions are too important to let grow organically through self-service development. Sometimes you need true BI experts who can design, implement, and support applications that will scale to significant data volumes and number of concurrent users.
In this video we look at a specific approach taken by the BI team at Microsoft that developed the analytic platform used by Microsoft finance[1].
This is one specific approach, but it demonstrates a few fundamental facts that can be overlooked too easily:
- Building an enterprise BI solution is building enterprise software, and it requires the rigor and discipline that building enterprise software demands
- Each delivery team has dedicated teams of experts responsible for their part of the whole
- Each business group with data and BI functionality included in the solution pays for what they get, with both money and personnel
Organizations that choose to ignore the need for experts tend to build sub-optimal solutions that fail to deliver on stakeholder expectations. These solutions are often replaced much sooner than planned, and the people responsible for their implementation are often replaced at the same time[2].
This isn’t the right place to go into the details of what sort of expertise you’ll need, because there’s too much to cover, and because the details will depend on your goals and your starting point. In my opinion the best place to go for more information is the Power BI whitepaper on Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment. This free resources delivers 250+ pages of wisdom from authors Melissa Coates and Chris Webb. You probably don’t need to read all of it, but odds are you will probably want to once you get started…
After this video and post were completed but before they were published, this story hit the global news wire: Botched Excel import may have caused loss of 15,841 UK COVID-19 cases | Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
Wow. Although I am generally a big fan of Ars Technica’s journalism, I need to object to the sub-headline: “Lost data was reportedly the result of Excel’s limit of 1,048,576 rows.”
Yeah, no. The lost data was not the result of a capability that has been well-known and documented for over a decade. The lost data was a result of using non-experts to do a job that experts should have done.
Choosing the wrong tool for a given job is often a symptom of not including experts and their hard-earned knowledge at the phases of a project where that expertise could have set everything up for success. This is just one example of many. Don’t let this happen to you.
[1] If you’re interested in a closer look at the Microsoft Finance COE approach, please check out this article in the Power BI guidance documentation.
[2] If you’ve been a consultant for very long, you’ve probably seen this pattern more than once. A client calls you in to replace or repair a system that never really worked, and all of the people who built it are no longer around.