Business Intelligence projects with Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI offers us a range of possibilities to adapt to our project, whether it is a corporate, departmental, team or individual project.
How to manage data culture in organizations
One of the main reasons for success in achieving objectives when incorporating and deploying a BI solution is to identify the type and scope of our project. Opting for Microsoft Power BI offers us a range of possibilities to adapt to our project, whether it is a corporate, departmental, team or individual project.
It offers us to provide the necessary tools so that, at all levels, our users adopt a better and more powerful company data culture: a key pillar in the digital transformation.
The enterprise can therefore choose to deliver and manage its Power BI projects through its own IT departments and projects or to empower certain users to take advantage of self-service BI capabilities with tools such as Power BI Desktop and Excel. In many scenarios, a combination of IT resources, such as local data gateway and premium Power BI licensing, can be combined with users’ knowledge of data and metrics by leveraging familiarity with data analytics and visualization, i.e. inclusively embedding data culture within our digital transformation vision.
They can also use alternative modes per project or with different teams depending on available resources and project needs. We will achieve greater value in Power BI projects when the technical expertise and governance of corporate BI solutions are combined with data exploration and analysis capabilities that can be made available to all users. The scalability and accessibility of Power BI solutions can support thousands of users, including read-only users who have not been assigned Power BI Pro licenses, by provisioning and purchasing Power BI Premium.
Types of Business Intelligence projects
With all this we will distinguish three approaches or types of Business Intelligence projects with Power BI:
Corporate BI
The one where the BI team develops and maintains both the Power BI data set (data model) and the required report visualizations is a common deployment option, particularly for large-scale projects and projects with key executive-level users or departments.
Provides maximum control over key BI objectives such as version control, scalability, usability and performance.
Visualizacion Self Service
The BI team/partner creates and maintains the data set, but certain key users with Power BI Pro licenses create reports and dashboards for consumption by other users. In many scenarios, business analysts and power users are comfortable with creating reports in Power BI Desktop (or, optionally, Excel) and can leverage their knowledge of the business to quickly develop useful visualizations and insights. Given the ownership of the data set, the BI team can be confident that only standard data sources and metric definitions will be used in the reports and ensure that the data set remains available, operational, updated or refreshed according to business objectives.
Data Stakeholders, who will be in charge of defining and maintaining the necessary single data policy, are of special importance here.
Self Service BI
In this approach the specialist BI team only contributes the essential infrastructure and monitoring, such as the use of a local data gateway and possibly the Power Premium capability needed to support the solution. Since it is the departments and power users who maintain control of both the data set and the visualization layer, users have maximum flexibility to tailor their own solutions, including the retrieval, transformation and modeling of data sources. However, this flexibility can be negated by lack of technical skills (e.g., DAX measures) and lack of technical knowledge, such as the relationships between tables in a database. In addition, departmentally controlled data sets can introduce versioning conflicts with corporate semantic models and generally lack the resilience, performance and scalability of IT-owned data sets.
Proof of Concept (POC)
Another common scenario is a proof-of-concept (POC) or small-scale self-service solution developed by a business user or team to move to a formal, IT-owned and managed solution. Power BI Desktop’s graphical interfaces at every layer of the application (query editor, data model, and reporting canvas) make it possible and often easy for users to create useful models and reports with minimal expertise and little or no code. Of course, it is much more difficult to deliver consistent reporting across business functions (i.e., finance, sales and marketing) and at scale in a secure, governed environment. The IT organization can improve the quality and analytical value of these assets, as well as provide strong governance and administrative controls to ensure that the right people are accessing the right data.
Project type selection
To select the type of project we need, we must ask ourselves three questions:
Who will own the data model? Who will own the reports and dashboards? How will Power BI be managed and distributed? We will develop these questions in the next installments where we will address how to plan, delimit and define what type and project we need in our BI .
In CepoBIA we understand and help our clients in their BI projects identifying the most appropriate type in each case providing our knowledge and experience in BI by the hand of Microsoft Power BI.
