- [Manu] Hello, and welcome to this video series
on the Power BI Adoption Framework,
which is about empowering every decision maker.
I'm Manu. - [Paul] And, I'm Paul.
- [Manu] And, in this video,
we'll provide an overview of the series.
Power BI is a great self-service BI tool,
and it's helping hundreds of thousands of organizations
to drive a data-driven culture.
Having said that, self-service BI is one
of the most challenging aspects of BI because it requires
a change in people, processes, and technology.
This framework provides a wrapper around Power BI,
which helps in understanding the various aspects of adoption,
including the challenges that you may face,
and provides a structured approach
for driving adoption of self-service BI.
With the amount of data that's available today,
people can be a lot more productive
if they're able to consume data quickly
and are able to make informed decisions.
Having said that, data culture is not a tool.
It is a change in mindsets and behaviors
and requires an approach that focuses
on managing this change.
One of the key reasons why our customers want to focus
on Power BI adoption is that BI has traditionally
been delivered via a waterfall methodology
where it takes months if not years to develop a solution,
and people have developed that mindset.
Power BI challenges that and requires a change
in the mindset because Power BI really enables agile BI.
Another common reason for customers
to adopt a self-service BI culture is that they have
a lot of legacy tools that have been developed
over the years by IT, business, and third parties.
And, they're living with these tools
because IT teams have a limited bandwidth.
These solutions are typically very expensive
to support and maintain.
The idea of making people capable
of developing their own solutions and replacing
those legacy tools is very attractive to our customers.
Return on investment for IT transformation is dependent
on behavior change, and we all know
that behavior change is discretionary.
Deployment and activation of IT tools is typically achieved
because it's within the control of the project team.
However, adoption and proficiency
are usually poorly achieved or not done at all
because they are directly proportionate to the value
that the individuals see in consuming that solution.
And, whose responsibility is it after all?
Adoption in IT is not very different
from other spheres of our life.
Adoption happens if the individual sees ongoing value
in using the product or service, and that's a good thing
because once someone can see value in something,
they will be able to do things differently.
It's like buying toys for my son.
I can buy them hoping that he'll
continuously entertain himself with them, but the charm
of a new toy normally disappears within a few minutes.
There are very few toys that continue
to excite him beyond the first five minutes.
A good example is a bicycle.
It's different from a lot of other toys
because it allows him to experience life differently.
In fact, more than the bicycle,
it's the experiences that it can facilitate.
It's the same with technology.
It's not about the tool,
it's about what the tool allows you to do differently.
The way people adopt tools is by going
through four stages of adoption.
At the first stage, people are aware
of the product and its features.
In case of Power BI, this could be
through a presentation from Microsoft or a partner.
The next stage comes when people understand the benefits
of the product and its features, and this could be through
a more detailed workshop or some research that they do.
It's about creating momentum at this stage.
People get enabled when they learn
to use the product and its features,
and this could be via trainings or self-exploration.
And finally, people adopt the product when they see
ongoing value in the product and use it regularly.
It is a progression,
and it's easy to lose interest at any point.
So, the value add should be
significant enough to keep people inspired.
If you want to drive change in people's behavior
by adopting a data-driven culture,
then you can set yourselves up for success
by accepting that this change will challenge
very deeply entrenched behaviors, and developing a plan
which will make this journey smooth,
exciting, and rewarding for your employees.
We thought we'd provide a bit of background
of the journey that we've been through
and why we are creating this video series.
We saw a lot of people getting energized
when they saw Power BI demos.
And, when it came to getting access to Power BI
and using it regularly, it was easy for a few,
but for the vast majority,
there were a few steps that needed to be taken
before people could actually start using Power BI.
Our customers started asking for help with those steps,
which were wider considerations around adopting Power BI,
so we thought, "Let's identify these steps
"and develop a framework that helps our customers
"to accelerate the rollout of Power BI
"with minimal governance and high confidence."
When we started working with customers
to develop this framework for Power BI adoption,
we leveraged the content from our amazing white papers.
The white paper format wasn't suitable
for interactive discussions, so we developed a set of slides
based on these white papers by putting them into context
of the latest stages of adoption that we discussed earlier.
We also worked closely with the Power BI product group
to align with the vision of the Power BI product team
and incorporate feedback from a range of customers.
We have an internal community at Microsoft called BI Champs.
In this community, we collaborate
to answer challenging customer or partner queries,
so we incorporated that learning into the slides as well.
Being Power BI geeks ourselves, we also created a word cloud
on this mailbox to identify the areas
that were top of mind for customers and partners.
Microsoft has had a viral adoption of Power BI
over the last few years, so we also spoke with the team
that helped with the rollout of Power BI
at Microsoft and captured their learning.
Finally, as we worked with customers and partners,
we captured their feedback along the way
and kept revising this content.
So, this framework has evolved
over the last three and a half years with feedback
from various channels, and there was an increasing demand
to make it available publicly
in an easily accessible format.
And, we thought that a video series will be
the most accessible method for customers
and partners across the globe.
Our intention is that you can either run
through this content yourself to develop an adoption plan
and establish a Center of Excellence for your organization,
or you can work with a partner who can help you do the same.
We spoke with a lot of our customers to understand
the key factors that influence the adoption of Power BI.
These are the factors that can be the key enablers
or blockers for adoption, and our most successful customers
have them covered in some way, shape, or form.
The feedback from customers was in three key areas.
The first one was about having a clear BI strategy,
which is primarily provided by the leadership team.
The second area is around addressing technical issues,
and these issues could be related to the customer's setup
or could be related to Power BI as a product.
The third key area is planning, and this is the one
where the results are directly proportionate
to the amount of effort that goes in.
Imagine a ship without a captain.
That's the situation that can arise
from not having executive sponsorship
for Power BI adoption, because Power BI adoption
in itself is not typically an organizational goal.
The goal is to drive a data-driven culture,
and if the company's leadership has that vision,
then they can set direction,
guide the whole process, appoint people
to manage the process, provide necessary funding,
and ensure commitment and progress.
Compliance, security, and governance
are very important topics in context
of any tool that enables self-service BI.
So, this is an extremely important topic for our customers.
Having control of these areas
increases everyone's confidence and allows everyone
to focus on getting value out of their data.
And this is where organizations that start
with clear BI scenarios that provide information
that people need to make decisions
in their day job can expect almost instant adoption.
When I think about data quality, I get reminded
of the quote, "Perfection is the enemy of good."
Every organization wants that their data
should be in the perfect shape,
and there should be only one version of the truth.
While this is possible for some solutions,
it's usually quite difficult
to get that perfect-world situation for all datasets,
as it's always a moving target.
The key with data quality is to find the right balance
between control and agility, and organizations
that find that balance are able
to accelerate their adoption of Power BI.
While Power BI is a cloud-based service,
the cloud elements of the service require a certain level
of administration, and there are some components
that can be installed on-premises.
For example, the Power BI desktop tool
or an on-premises gateway.
It's good to have a strategy for installing
and updating these tools up front
so that the rollout of Power BI happens smoothly.
Power BI's capabilities are improving at an amazing speed.
Having said that, there are scenarios
where there are product gaps, and Power BI may not yet
have certain capabilities that your organization needs.
While we try to listen to our customers
through various channels and incorporate
these new capabilities as quickly as possible,
one of the key strengths of the Microsoft stack
is that we have multiple tools that integrate very well
with Power BI, so sometimes it's a matter
of identifying a different way of achieving
the same outcome using a set of tools
rather than Power BI on its own.
Understanding the different profiles of the users,
their technical know-how, the organization's culture,
maturity, and diversity are really important
for the rollout and adoption of Power BI, because
if you're mindful of these important elements
which are specific to each organization,
you can develop an adoption plan
that will be effective for that particular organization.
As an example, the technical profile
of users in a tech company would be very different
from a retail organization.
Programmatically designing the adoption plan
can help you plan for self-service BI success,
and this is the key focus of this whole series.
Center of Excellence is an interesting concept.
There are various interpretations of the concept.
However, the common principles are
that it includes representatives from across the business
who are champions for driving a data-driven culture,
and they develop ways of working to ensure consistency
and maintain ability while ensuring that security
and compliance are in everyone's mind.
A Center of Excellence can put a very positive spin
on the whole journey and can ensure
that consistent progress is made.
We've seen examples where a Center of Excellence has led
to viral adoption of Power BI, so we would
highly recommend that you consider developing one.
This framework has a strong focus
on all of these topics, so we'll discuss them
in a lot more detail in subsequent videos.
- [Paul] We've broken Power BI adoption into three phases.
Envision, where the aim is to prove the value
of Power BI to a core group of people.
Onboard, where you'll implement that first solution
and plan how you'll roll out across your organization.
And drive value, where you'll roll out
and encourage others to use Power BI.
Throughout this series, we will cover these areas in detail,
from the envisioning phase, where we'll talk
about why you need an executive sponsor
and how you can educate them
about the values of Power BI and self-service BI.
We'll talk about how to identify Power BI champions
in the business, the benefits of training
this pilot team during the envisioning,
and provide recommendations on the initial proof of value
that you can create to demonstrate Power BI
to your organization using your data.
At the onboarding phase, we focus on how to select
that initial pilot to further prove the value,
how to run the adoption workshop,
which helps you to decide on governance,
service management, security, rollout, and support.
We talk about what you need to consider
about data management, and we'll provide recommendations
on how to implement that first solution and what to do next.
Lastly, with drive value, we cover how and why
to build a Center of Excellence team,
provide suggestions around how you can internally market
the solutions that you're creating.
We outline our definition of the different types of users
and what training we recommend for them
and how you can support all of this
by building a community inside your organization.
In terms of the long-term engagement model,
the intention with self-service BI is
to enable individuals to create their own solutions,
but this will happen in stages.
So at the initial stages, IT and partners
could be heavily involved to lay the foundations
for self-service BI and deliver corporate BI solutions.
At the next stage, IT and partners
could be supporting business teams
while they develop their own solutions,
and they can develop relatively complex solutions as well.
The final stage, the intention is
that the business users will be able
to support each other in developing solutions,
so IT and partners will primarily provide guidance
and develop advanced solutions.
When running through the Adoption Framework
for the first time, this tends to start
with a workshop whereby you would discuss
all of the content covered in this series.
This tends to be a two to three day workshop,
depending on the current level of understanding of Power BI
and the current journey towards self-service BI,
typically based on the maturity
of data availability throughout your business.
During the workshop, many key configuration decisions
will be made, along with who will own it and who will do it.
All of this needs to be documented.
This will help with why a decision was made
as well as give everyone an opportunity
to have an input on these decisions.
It is unlikely you will manage to get
all of the relevant decisions made
and owners agreed in the initial workshop,
so there will be a round of follow-up discussions
and refinements of decisions and documentation.
Once this has all been done, a plan for rollout
and further iterations should be clearly established
to ensure everyone gets the right level of access,
and everyone can start benefiting
from the rich functionality of Power BI.
During this series, we will provide a key set of questions
to ask and decide upon, with a recommendation
that you document these so everyone knows
what to do, why, and who will do it.
These questions fit into two categories.
The first being with who will take ownership
and responsibility for a part of Power BI.
For example, who will administer the Power BI service?
Or, who will communicate the rollout plan?
The second set of questions aims to capture
specific tasks, such as automatic license assignment
or configuring a Teams channel
to create a Power BI community.
Alongside all of these videos, we also provide
all of the presentations used in the description
below the video along with a sample output document.
The intention is that you watch this series and run
the workshop inside your or your customer's organization.
Thanks for listening, and if you have any feedback
or questions, please leave a comment down below.
See you in the next one.