Building a dataculture with Power BI

I meet a lot of customers in my job, either through the Microsoft field or at conferences and many times we hear the same: “We love Power BI and we as IT have enabled it for everyone now”. Of course this is great news that we love to hear. Unfortunately that approach rarely works. Users in the organisation don’t know the tools exist, how to get access, where to find good data sources, already uses VLOOKUP Excel for 10 years and manually refreshes this every week, Security team is scared of the data getting into the wrong hands, where to get help?

As you can see there are a lot of questions that need to be answered when you role out any product. Of course it is a self service product but some guidance is appreciated. I compare it to driving a car, anyone can push the pedal and steer. The real problem is not the driving (although maybe a bit). It is to understand how you navigate traffic and how to find your way. Even here someone is providing you with signs where to go and gives you driving lessons.

Introducing the Power BI Adoption framework

So how can you help your users be successful in getting more out of their data? The team at Microsoft in the UK (Manu Kanwarpal and Paul Henwood) have solved this problem at several big customers. This has resulted in what we call the “The Power BI Adoption Framework”. The framework is a set of roles, responsibilities, and behaviors to help your organisation adopt Power BI. Of course there is no right or wrong way, but I see this as a great start of the journey for a dataculture in your organisation.

The content is available on GitHub and YouTube. The GitHub contains a set of PowerPoints by topic:

The growing playlist of videos at the official Power BI YouTube channel contain training content to supplement the slides. 

I believe this news is huge and hopeful it will help your (or your customers) to make more out of the data in your organisation and provide Power BI for everyone.