Power BI - how to get the most from your data.

In Part 3 of our series on Power BI CTO Mark Rotherham and Head of the Data Services Michael Gleeson return to talk to Peter Filitz about about preparing your business for Power BI. 

After recapping value of Power BI FORSMEs and SMBs, from speed to value, to ROI, to the accessibility of data Mark and Mike break down the preparatory steps your business needs to get the most out of your data, highlighting the importance of understanding your business problems first, in order to create effective data strategies.

This emphasis on business strategy allows Power BI to function as a business tool, one that not only streamlines data but also allows for data-based problem-solving across the organisation.

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Transcript

Peter: 0:02

Hello and welcome to today's podcast. Yeah, on today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking to Mark and Mike who joined us in the first two episodes talking about Power BI. We are going to talk a little more about how you and your business can get ready for Power BI. But before we go into that, Mike, would you like to give us a quick recap on episode two? I know we spoke about some use cases. Might be good just to quickly recap on the benefits that businesses are seeing from incorporating Power BI into their technology stacks.

SPEAKER_01: 0:35

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Peter. As you said, we um we covered off some scenarios where we were talking about how SME and SMB customers were using Power BI. We went through some of the challenges that they have and also some of the benefits. A few of the benefits were kind of speed to value, ROI, and visibility, and just how the customers are using those data sets and Power BI dashboards now that we've actually implemented them for them.

Peter: 1:01

That's great. Yeah, so true. I guess talking a little bit about getting ready for Power BI and what businesses really need to do to get the most out of their data. There's obviously a few elements that should be taken into consideration. Mike, could you share with us what businesses should be looking at working on in order to get ready for Power BI?

SPEAKER_01: 1:27

I think firstly, what I'd probably like to cover off is that I don't really see Power BI as a technology project. I see it as a business tool. I see it as something that can help businesses with the problems that they have relating to data, but it can also be used as a workflow engine, you know, with highlighting problems and processing them through to management teams to be able to take action on them. How you get ready for that, I think, as we have discussed previously, nobody's data's perfect and data's an ongoing project, which will probably be going for as long as the company exists. Um data's ever changing, it changes all the time. And how you manage it will change as well. So I think anything around how data's structured and how companies are using it and how you can clean the data up, I think will add benefit to any projects that you might want to do with Power BI. But I think the key for it for me is it's highlighting the business problems that you think data can use in an analytics tool can actually solve. And if you understand the problem and you've got the people that um understand the data, then it makes your project easier to succeed. I think what we find is that you need to remove the technology element from it and put the people and the process in. And once you understand what that is, it's easier to use the technology to resolve the problem.

Peter: 2:47

Thanks, Mike. That's really insightful. Now, what would you say is important to get the most out of your data? How should clients or or businesses, shall we say, approach it?

SPEAKER_01: 3:00

So personally, I think it's it's probably going back to what the problems are. Data can be used in many different ways. And I think if you understand what your business problems are and what you think the data might be able to resolve for it, I think that's the key step for me in terms of knowing what it's going to do.

SPEAKER_00: 3:16

Yeah, it's all about the use case, isn't it? It's going in and saying what are the real challenges that you want to uncover with data and focusing on those first. And then you you snowball it and you keep going. Because the first one's the trickiest, but also probably the most fruitful to get going with. And at that point you've set the scene, haven't you? You've set the the value of the data, you can use it, you can explore it, and you can go to the next challenge. That's exactly what we've done within BCN. You know, we've been on a data journey since we started. But most recently we found ourselves looking at things like uh what's the most important data point that we need as a business for us to improve on and to get better at. And and we spend time with our data team making sure that that's the thing that we we expose and get the value out. Every business will have a data challenge and what we do and what Mike does is home in on that challenge and work on the right strategy to get an outcome uh as effectively as possible.

Peter: 4:13

That's great. And and just touching on BCN as an example, I guess, could you elaborate and provide a little more detail around the approach that uh businesses should take with regards to the data journey?

SPEAKER_00: 4:29

Yeah, absolutely. So i it's a fun one, yeah, because everyone's starting at a different point. But if we start from um a typical customer engagement, I tend to call this kind of a reactive customer where they recognise that they need to do something and they want us to have a quick reaction to do something with them. And in this case, they're typically not really using Power BI at this moment in time. And what we can do is work with them to do uh what Max mentioned a few times, speed to value. Yeah, so we can take their data from where it is today and we can help them explore that data. It makes a huge leap from static reporting as soon as you see data being visualized within Power BI and growing over time. The investment you make in your first dashboard doesn't stop after week one. Week two, when data comes in, you you you see it build out. So it's kind of the first step on that journey. As we kind of move on from that step, we start looking at how we then uh share that data out there and how we make it available, but also more importantly, how we make sure that the data is cleaned on its way through, so we do have a single source of truth. So it's going from a discrete kind of point-to-point, you know, Excel to Power BI or even SQL to Power BI. We've considered the sources and we've joined the data, and we're presenting a single source of truth that can be consumed through Power BI. And at this point we can start to layer in the security domain, so role-based access. So the persona that you are sees the things that we want you to see rather than everything. Uh and people at the top of the tree can see more than people at the bottom of the tree. So it's all about having that kind of scaled out approach to the data. As we kind of build out on that, we can start to create what what I'd call kind of organizational adoption. And this is where you get the concept of a data mart, which is effectively a collection of data for a department. So you'll have your overarching single source of truth data for your organization, and you get to the point where right the finance team need to see this bit, and the sales team need to see this bit, and your projects team would like to see this bit. And it's all derived from the same single source of truth that's going through our pipelines, that's secured and is robust, but we're publishing it in a way that can be consumed at an organizational level. And this is where BCN are on their journey with data. You know, we are creating our own data maps or data cubes, and we publish them out to the teams so that they've all got reliable, reusable, single source of truth data that's consistent across our business that we can trust and use and basically make decisions against. Now, the next steps where it gets fun, and here we can talk about advanced compute, warehousing, more advanced data handling, but also cool things like the data activator, where we can start to have actions off the back of our data fed out. Now, um this is a fabric-enabled capability that actually makes Power BI not just a pane of glass that you can go and look into, but it actually lets us have notifications fed out of it. Uh, and that could be in the form of emails or messaging teams or even custom flows or API calls. So it really does add to the capability of Power BI. And that's, you know, that's where BCN are headed once we've figured out and got to the end of our adoption of our kind of Datamart and DataCube part of our kind of journey. So yeah, that that's kind of the journey we're on and roughly how we see customers going on their journey as well.

Peter: 8:02

That's been great. Thanks so much, Mark. Super insightful. I think you've given a lot of food for thought for our audience. So if you're a a business that has a challenge with managing and reporting on your data, have multiple sources where your data is located and you want to try and bring it together and make more sense. BCN can add value to your business. So please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. Feel free to visit us at www.bcn.co.uk. Thanks again so much for joining us. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mike. Thanks, Peter.

SPEAKER_01: 8:38

Thanks, Peter. Speak to you soon.

Peter: 8:40

Have a good day.