Ultimate Power BI

Deployment Guide
“The role of an Analytics Center of Excellence (CoE)
is to provide a strong centralized authority to guide
internally the production and consumption of accurate
and scalable business intelligence. This group or team
is central to the development of a productive and
beneficial data culture.”
—Sam McKay, CEO, Enterprise DNA
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
In this guide you will learn:

Current State 4
What is the current state of enterprise analytics and data cultures?
A history lesson.

Data Culture 6
What do you want for the ultimate state of your data culture?
Dreaming of the possibilities.

Technical or Cultural 8
What is the real issue at play within organizations?

Best Overall Solution 9

Power BI Why? What makes Power BI the best overall solution.

Cost to Value 11
What is the cost to value proposition to transition to a rich
data‑driven culture?

Effective Development 12
Where do you start?

Deployment Challenges 13
Power BI considerations within an organization

Empowered Employees 16
Who makes the decisions and who enables them?

Data-driven Strategy 17
Key pillars of a data-driven strategy

Measuring Success 18
How can you measure success?

Speed or Accuracy 19
What is more important, and can you get both successfully at the
same time?

Structure & Resources 20

What is the best internal structuring for a Power BI rollout?

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Licensing 22
Power BI licensing considerations

Technical Aspects 23
What technical aspects of Power BI development do you need to
get right?

Implementation Pitfalls 25
Where can implementation fail and what to watch out for?

Skills & Resources 26

Do you have the skills and resourcing available to make it happen?

Successful Governance 27
Why you should set up a Power BI Centre of Excellence?

Centre of Excellence 28
Why you need Enterprise DNA’s Power BI Center of Excellence?

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CURRENT STATE

What is the current state of enterprise analytics and data

cultures? A history lesson.

When did information start playing a significant role in driving

organizations?
Since the beginning of accounting, the need to perform calculations has existed. Computers
improved calculation speeds; the Internet allowed for more data capture.

Excel and PowerPoint

For 30 years, Excel was the standard tool for performing calculations and Excel had immense
flexibility. It could be coded into ‘apps’ by savvy users. However, the presentation and
distribution layers were missing and PowerPoint was used to repurpose the output of these
calculations; presenting their insights in isolated meeting events.

To create any additional insights, employees

had to spend further time:

•• Re-calculating their Excel spreadsheets

•• Manually redoing their PowerPoint presentations
•• Rescheduling another version of the same meeting

The cycle of employees spending the bulk of their

days, creating analysis and presentations to present
“up the chain” repeats week after week, month after
month. It was like making a Hollywood movie but
having no way to distribute it outside the editing room

Other Tools?
Other tools became available, selling a dream of more complex insights, better-designed
presentations, and handling larger data volumes. But did they make as significant an impact as
the Excel spreadsheet that everyone within an organization could use?

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Organization Friction
Competing business units fuelled “the killer Excel spreadsheet” stories where IT had to step
in and attempt to take more data and reporting ownership. Little changed in most internal
business unitsʼ behavior as users just went off and did their work, utilizing the more structured
data now available.

Another friction soon developed; resentment appeared between front office users wanting
to take more ownership of their data and going through a gatekeeper every time. To enable a
central IT team to understand all the business user requirements was never going to work. Users
demanded another way, but this typically resulted in more ad hoc work, developing custom
solutions away from IT.

An IT-centric view contributed to why Excel has been such a pervasive tool within any
organization to evaluate data and find meaningful insight. Combined with PowerPoint, it has
been the staple of organizational insight collaboration.

Today your organization likely has siloed IT from various business units with little coordination
or consistency around data initiatives. If you have been successful, you are one of the luckier
ones with outstanding leadership.

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DATA CULTURE

What do you want for the ultimate state of your data

culture? Dreaming of the possibilities.
What if you could create a consistent stream of data flowing
around your organization?
You could:
•• Access to the raw material (your data)
•• Mine for it under the ground
•• Suck it up through pipes
•• Collate the materials together to generate added value, then
•• Distribute those insights seamlessly out to relevant markets

Well, all of this is possible with the new analytical tool, Power BI.

Imagine your future today

•• You wake up, open your analytics app on your
phone or tablet, and see the key metrics from
overnight.
•• In the car or bus to work, you prepare a recorded
call sharing your teamʼs critical insights.
•• Once into your office, you review all the critical
metrics around what drives the current business
strategy.
•• You meet your leadership team. You already know
what the figures are.
•• Your colleagues are also more informed and
focused because they have not spent the last
three days getting a report together. They also can
access the same information.
•• Your reports are automated, so you access
your internal portal and dive into the most
relevant discussion topic in your meeting. If the
information does not seem to be quite right, you
check it right then and there. If it doesnʼt exist,
you just query your data directly in the meeting;
no need to wait another three days to get another
presentation. No time is wasted.

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•• As an organization, you can now focus on new challenges or business-

critical tasks, like meeting clients, improving your offshoring, and
exploring new business strategies. You have time to run analysis
forecasting out to the future. Understand what might happen if specific
scenarios eventuate. How will they affect the business and the vital
organization metrics critical to future prosperity?
•• You walk out of your meeting through the foyer, where giant screens
broadcast critical information like human resource employment
engagement metrics and customer satisfaction scores.
•• You then have a difficult customer call and need to know everything
about the client relationship and importance to your business going
forward. You run over to your client manager and bring up historical
sales information, comparing them to forward-looking revenue numbers
captured from your CRM system. You do this all through the Power BI
portal.
•• You ask your colleague to send you the link to the report. Back in your
office, you call the client while reviewing comprehensive information
on every interaction they have ever had with you. You have a more
personalized conversation; you know how they fit into the firmʼs overall
position.
•• This scenario is one of many ways Power BI can build a real analytics
culture and how that culture can transform any organization. It is all
possible – right now! Nothing stops any organization from achieving this,
and with the right investment and leadership, you can do it.

Unlocking business value

Just think about the value you could create.

•• How much time could be saved and re-allocated?

•• Can resourcing needs be changed?
•• How could clear insights impact long term decision-making?
Is there a choice not to aim for this? No – if your competitors or industry is in any way doing
it, you will quickly be left behind. Investing in a data-driven culture, creating a data-based
organization is likely one of the most significant investments any business can make today.

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TECHNICAL OR CULTURAL

What is the real issue at play within organizations?

The real issue

Both technical and cultural issues hold organizations back from optimizing a real data culture.
Culture flows from the technology used, and it is hard to build a culture around something that
has not been possible or has not been made easy. You probably have historical baggage around
poor technology choices and implementations that have created a siloed culture of one-off and
non-collaborative analysis.
An organizationʼs ability to embed technology that will make a difference [at a value proposition
that makes sense] is now possible with Power BI.
•• The Power BI platform and suite of tool have inherently added a significant amount of
functionality to data culture
•• Historical layers of operational complexity “required” to generate insights can be made
redundant
•• Power BI can distribute valuable analytics to the people that need it to make decisions

Data culture
Solving these aspects of data intelligence enables the possibility to build a meaningful data
culture. What is data culture? You can define data culture as an immersion in the truth. Decision
making flows from this and should:
•• Be quality
•• Be timely
•• Be based on all the available information
•• Recommend optimizing time, effort, and resources within an organization

Why has this not happened before?

Power BI now solves the missing layers, providing the ability to:
•• Distribute insights using the online service
•• Model data to consolidate insights from various data sets
•• Automatically refresh data and on an almost real-time basis or an as-needed basis
•• Collaborate in a cloud-based environment across an organization
•• Create provisioned workspaces so teams within organizations can manage their data and
reporting assets

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BEST OVERALL SOLUTION

Power BI Why? What makes Power BI the best overall

solution.

Power BI is going to change the way organizations manage and utilize

insights derived from data.
If data is the new fuel, Power BI is the new processing engine, powering decisions and
determining outcomes we have probably not seen before.
Power BI is revolutionary, not just for its visuals (there are other data visualization tools out
there), but for a far more comprehensive range of reasons.
Microsoft is creating an analytical ecosystem, with Power BI as the visualization tool at the ‘tip of
the spear’ of nearly all its cloud-based technologies.redundant

Simply put, an investment in Power BI will serve you well, now and in the future.

Consolidate Data
Data everywhere on multiple platforms, from enterprise databases, cloudbased
platforms to simple spreadsheets. Now you can consolidate these into one
compact data model and use these datasets in combination with each other.

Distribution Platform
Access insights from desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. Update centrally
and synchronize globally – finally, a distribution platform for analysis that fits
the new digital age.

Real value for $

For what you are getting, Power BI is remarkably inexpensive. The paid
subscription (which we thoroughly recommend for the collaboration features)
is a bargain at $10 USD per month per user. To get this sort of functionality
historically was in the $1000s, sometimes even more.

Obtainable learning curve

Anyone can learn key functionality; getting started on Power BI is obtainable.
We caution though, to do game-changing things there is a bit more to it. That is
where we come in!

The analytical engine

Power BI is a powerful engine! Once you get the hang of it, you will quickly see
that it changes the way you look and find insights. Hard calculations in Excel
are made simple, and building interactive reports is made easy.

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Microsoft Integration
The cloud is the real deal and the future for enterprise technology. If you use
Microsoft Office, then Power BI is on your roadmap. Integration with Power BI is
seamless and cost-effective. Game-changing insights are now a click away.

Business Continuity
The last thing you want with any analytical tool is to lose any business
continuity when there are inevitable internal changes. You want a widely used
platform readily resourced by the large stable enterprise (Microsoft) and under
active development. Power BI will be just like Excel is now.

Enterprise Integration
Already have SQL databases, SAP, Salesforce, or Xero? Power BI plugs into these
technologies and can even consolidate information from them, including from
Excel spreadsheets. Architecting solutions is an art, but well worth learning.

The Roadmap
We love Power BI as it is now, but the vision and roadmap are outstanding! The
ecosystem continues to evolve with:
— Azure (Microsoft Cloud)
— Business Application Platform including PowerApps and Power Automate
— Cortana Intelligence Suite, including predictive analytics and machine
learning

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COST TO VALUE

What is the cost to value proposition to transition to a rich

data‑driven culture?
Transitioning to a data-driven culture
With hyper-competitive markets, it has never been more critical to find an edge with the digital
assets you can consume and create within an organization. The most successful organizations
are those harnessing the value embedded of data and the accumulation of knowledge derived
from these informational sources such as:
•• Sales and marketing efforts
•• Human resource challenges
•• Financing activities
•• Operational activities
•• Customer data

Regardless of your position within an organization, the function you work in, or the market
you compete in, it is imperative that you harness your data assets and build a meaningful data
culture where decisions are not made solely through intuition. At a minimum, there needs to be
a thread of justification and attribution around why you are making decisions and doing things a
certain way.

Historically you could say that this scenario has played out before with many technologies and
tools being embedded into organizations to bring this data to life. But there is a clear difference
this time around.

The ability to find and discover insights, produce valuable analysis, and represent data in a
compelling and consumable way has never come at a cheaper cost. With Power BI, you benefit
from a complete set of data management, analysis, and distribution tools. Implementation of
this toolset can be achieved at:
•• A lower monetary cost
•• An achievable level for the everyday user
•• A reduced requirement to implement technology for users and employees to utilize

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EFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT

Where do you start?

How does information spread?
If you want to make a difference in the way insights are managed and consumed within an
organization, you need to think about how things generally spread. How does:
•• Viral information spread online?
•• A virus spread throughout the world?
•• News spread wildly across the communities and regions?
Enterprise DNA holds a unique view of how this proliferates throughout an organization without
massive setup costs.

Create a buzz around a minimal subset of reports

Start with small reports done at a low cost within a specific business function or a subset of
super-users within an organization. In turn, use these reports almost as a marketing tool to
generate network effects across the organization around data insights. You can use Power BI
reports to quickly sell your executives on quality insights reviewed in a dynamic way across any
device.

It is not uncommon that by placing a Power BI report into the hands of someone who has only
seen Excel files or been delivered information in an email to be amazed at what they are seeing.

Educate users
The ability to see so much comprehensive information and drill down into very granular
information has never been possible at any scale before, until now, with Power BI. Inspiring
education, such as that provided by Enterprise DNA, plays a key role as it:

•• Builds report builderʼs confidence

•• Creates excitement about what is achievable with the data at their disposal
•• Showcases what employees can achieve
•• Provides a vision of how quickly they can achieve it

Measure your progress

It is also about measuring where you currently reside and the progress around your data
management efforts or your data culture efforts. You can accomplish this very easily without
vast amounts of resource allocation, especially with the help of Enterprise DNA, which has
created the necessary measurement tools and surveys to record information that matters,
and that will serve as a record of how your data culture initiatives are performing.

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DEPLOYMENT CHALLENGES

Power BI considerations within an organization

Team Readiness
•• Developer, report-builder training
•• Report-consumer training
•• Administration support

Report Design
•• Layouts
•• Navigation
•• Summary vs. details
•• Visualizations
•• Colors
•• Style
•• Mobile
•• Interactivity
•• Narrative

Security Management
•• Data source access
•• Report access (view/edit)
•• Sharing reports with peers and third parties
•• Report data access (Row level security)

License Management
•• Office 365
•• Power BI licenses
a) Pro licenses
b) Power BI Premium
c) Power BI Report Server (on-premises)
d) Power BI Embedded
•• Adding/removing licenses

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Standards and Data Governance

•• Focus on the internal audience – communication is key!
•• An organization must agree on what data is “correct”
•• Identify data “certifiers”
•• Communicating data refresh timing
•• Limit publishing permissions to a group that certifies reports meet “official” organizational
criteria
•• Data sources
•• Security

Compliance
•• Internal and external
•• Configuring the platform
•• Reporting on security procedures
•• Internal compliance teams communicating requirements to the entire organization

Architecture Best Practices

•• Cloud vs. on-premises (Power BI Report Server)
•• Modelling in Power BI vs. Analysis Services
•• On-premises Gateway
•• Power BI import vs. DirectQuery (live connection)
•• Where to apply security (data layer, reporting layer)

Pace of Product Change

•• Many organizations are used to managing software upgrades on their own
— Power BI Desktop – updates monthly
— Power BI service – cloud updates
•• Shorter product roadmap/horizon (three years vs. six months)

New Feature Adoption

•• Power BI Desktop and service
•• Keeping up with new features
•• All new Power BI use cases
•• How to use new features
•• Apps
•• Bookmarks and navigation
•• Report page tooltips
•• Data Flow
•• Machine Learning with Data Flows

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Data Culture

People want:
•• Good clean data at their fingertips
•• The ability to perform insightful analysis
•• To use predictive or advanced analytics

These require good data. Good data requires:

•• Effort in capturing data
•• Effort in curating data

The effort often requires:

•• Changes in the status quo
•• Senior management to drive and encourage the required changes

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EMPOWERED EMPLOYEES
Who makes the decisions and who enables them?
Transitioning to a data-driven culture
Power BI (the technology) has broken down the
barriers to effective collaboration around data
and data management. The key to producing this
high-quality data culture is your people through
employee (the people) empowerment. It takes an
entire organization of different functions working
together to empower all. You need to:

•• Avoid silos of effort and expertise

•• Not allow the monopolization of technology and information to hold your efforts back
•• Use Power BIʼs tools to produce a consistent stream of analytical insights that can be
coordinated effectively and contains the correct security provisions

A virtual function
There is a case to creating a new virtual function within an organization focused on data
analytics. A group of superusers can create specific workspaces and groups that align
throughout the Office 365 suite. The Power BI experience can be made seamless and inclusive
to everyone in any organization and any business function. The key is empowering the user to
either be:
•• A creator or developer of Power BI reports, or
•• A consumer of Power BI reports
The idea is not to leave anyone out of the loop.

Integrated daily work routines

Start with education to ensure that employees are inspired to make using Power BI a part of
their daily work routine. Power BI needs to be as prevalent within a daily workflow as checking
email. Within the Office 365 suite:
•• Power BI is one click away from your email management tool, and
•• Users are one click from embedding reports into MS Teams conversations

It is just the beginning. The road map for Power BI is total immersion throughout all Office 365
tools, including:
•• PowerPoint templates
•• Word documents
•• Emails
•• Microsoft Teams
•• Apps, and much more
No suite of tools competes with the vast array of network effects resulting from the effective
implementation of Power BI. It is illogical to think that any of these is possible without all
employeesʼ empowerment, encouragement, and inclusiveness.

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DATA-DRIVEN STRATEGY

Key pillars of a data-driven strategy

Todayʼs environment is shaped by:

•• Growth in data volume

•• Changing competitive landscape

with the emergence of data-driven
competitors

•• Access to new analysis tools

•• Development of fit for purpose

analysis languages

How do you position your organization?

Anchor your data-driven strategy to the following pillars:

1. Information supports decision-making

2. Decision-making based on data insights and evidence rather than intuition
3. Adapt quickly and thrive – based on the latest iterative results
4. Harness transformational change based on automated analytical insights
5. Team members attempt to seek data, identify patterns, and share findings with others
6. Create a learning organization
7. Foster a pervasive culture of analytics

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MEASURING SUCCESS

How can you measure success?

How do you measure the success of a Power BI implementation?

It is all about user engagement.

How do you measure user engagement?

You need the measuring tools to do this. Itʼs not complicated, but it does require:

•• Asking the right questions

•• At the right time
•• In a simple format
•• That employees can access it at any time on any device

Enterprise DNA has measuring tools and reporting to enable this for any organization.

Inbuilt consumption analytics

Not only can you find great insights from your own data sets, but Power BI also has granular
reporting on which reports are used throughout an organization. You are creating more
metadata to be analyzed! This information allows business leaders and executives to
understand what the organization is focusing on, managing effectively, what should be most
important initiatives within an organization?

Integrated daily work routines

Start with education to ensure that employees are inspired to use Power BI as part of their
daily work routine. Power BI needs to be as prevalent within a daily workflow as checking email.
Within the Office 365 suite:

•• Power BI is one click away from your email management tool, and
•• Users are one click from embedding reports into MS Teams conversations

It is just the beginning. The road map for Power BI is total immersion throughout all Office 36
tools, including:
•• PowerPoint templates
•• Word documents
•• Emails
•• Microsoft Teams
•• Apps, and much more

No suite of tools competes with the vast array of network effects resulting from the effective
implementation of Power BI. It is illogical to think that any of these is possible without all
employees' empowerment, encouragement, and inclusiveness.

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SPEED OR ACCURACY

What is more important, and can you get both successfully

at the same time?
Speed or accuracy?
It is a combination of both, but there is no reason why you cannot prioritize one over the other
at certain stages of your implementation. In the initial phase, it is to generate the buzz to get the
viral feedback loop. Some speed is essential to get the buy-in from your organization. Once you
get to a point where this occurs, accuracy becomes paramount.

Prototyping
Power BI has excellent prototyping capabilities where you can quickly:
•• Prototype report
•• Generate feedback
•• Assess whether there is the perceived value in pursuing more reporting or more analysis for a
particular data set or data scenario

Reports do not have to be production-ready; you can quickly put them in an unverified state
requiring future assessment. Still, it should not stop you from using it as a marketing tool to
showcase Power BIʼs potential for analysis in other organization areas.

Power BI allows you to switch on or off particular reports based on where they may be in the
verification stages. Itʼs effortless to:

1. Embed some simple workflows into user activities to show some reports in specific
workspaces as experimental reporting or unverified data analysis
2. Have a separate workspace where production-ready reports are delivered to decision-

Iteration
Another benefit of using Power BI is the immense ability to iterate on your analysis and build
very quickly on your report creation. This brings an enormous scale to your analytical capability.
Historically this was enormously difficult with Excel files and data dispersed everywhere and
difficult to contain. Within Power BI, you can automate the data ingestion and modelling of
different data sets into one complete model that can be used and iterated on over the long
term. A report can quickly start as a small experiment but morph into a complete analytical
solution that brings together many great insights with the accuracy required to make reliable
decisions.

Distribution workflow
Publishing reports and detailed information to a broad group of consumers is simple with
Power BI. Consequently, a big part of a Power BI implementationʼs success is embedding the
right workflow around report distribution. This operational structure must be developed so that
accurate information is available to the right people at the right time.

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STRUCTURE & RESOURCES

What is the best internal structuring for a Power BI

rollout?

Cross-functional super-users
Selecting a group of resources from across the organization to create a subset of super-users is
the best strategy to kickstart a Power BI implementation. These users can come from a range of
backgrounds; you might have:
•• IT specialists
•• Analysts
•• Savvy personnel, or
•• Anyone proficient in using Excel or PowerPoint

You want to include all subsets of these users

within this new super-user group of Power
BI users – because it is essential to get buy-
in at all levels of skills and capabilities. If you
just focus on one subset, you will immediately
see a mismatch between what end consumers
need and what is being developed for them
within Power BI. The speed in which you receive
insights into your deploymentsʼ effectiveness

Sub-group hub creation

Once this group is selected, we recommend creating subgroups across various data hubs within
an organization. These hubs could be around business functions or certain essential aspects
of your data requirements. The direction you choose would be dependent on your business
use case and where you feel you would generate the most value the quickest from your
implementation or your deep dive into certain aspects of your data. You can create a blend of:

•• Organization sub-groups: finance, marketing, operational, HR, logistics subsets

•• User sub-groups: focused on customers, revenues, internal optimizations, digital, customer
service, and much more

Enterprise DNA has training content and resource covering nearly every scenario that you could
foresee or experience. The Enterprise DNA education platform focuses on empowering the
analyst with best practices that can be applied across various data sets and data scenarios
within typical business functions or organizational markets.

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Central oversight

There should be a central management hub that oversees the initial implementation, led by a
specific data analytics team, a subset of the group, or a select few throughout the business. This
central management team needs to:
•• Create the right processes
•• Maintain quality metrics to develop consistent reporting
•• Pursue a single version of the truth
•• Develop a collaborative environment for your Power BI deployment to prosper

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LICENSING

Power BI licensing considerations

User-based licensing
There are two types of user-based licensing options:

•• Power BI Free is a user-based license that includes

using the Power BI service for personal use. No
collaboration or content distribution options are
available with the free tier. Power BI Free licenses
are not suited to enterprise deployment, except
when used in conjunction with a Power BI Premium
license.
•• Power BI Pro is a user-based license that includes
all Power BI Free features, plus the ability to share
and collaborate with colleagues in the Power BI
service. The ability to use all features associated
with workspaces are available to Power BI Pro
users.

Capacity-based licensing
There are two types of capacity-based licensing
options:

•• Power BI Premium is a capacity-based license.

Power BI Premium includes many additional
benefits and the capability to distribute read-only
content to report consumers with Power BI Free
licenses..
•• Power BI Embedded, a capacity-based license,
purchased as an Azure service, which provides
the ability to render Power BI content in custom
business applications.

Server-based licensing
There is one server-based option:

•• Power BI Report Server is a reporting portal

that supports the delivery of paginated reports
alongside Power BI reports, Excel reports, and
mobile reports. It is a basic reporting portal that
offers an alternative to the Power BI service to
publish and consume reports.

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TECHNICAL ASPECTS

What technical aspects of Power BI development do you

need to get right?

Technology stack
There are many tools that an organization can use for the management of its data. Let us
call this your technology stack or your data analysis stack. Businesses, big or small, can
get incredible value out of using Power BI across the current data technology stack that
you have embedded in your organization.

Power BI usage itself does not always require every comprehensive piece of data
infrastructure you may use. “Sold” primarily to increase customer spend, they bring
additional levels of complexity that are just not required depending on the size of your
organization and the volumes of data.

Accessing data
With data increasingly positioned in the cloud, Power BI can seamlessly ingest data
via APIs or various inbuilt connectors. You will be amazed at what you can do from raw
data sitting in systems like SQL Server and Oracle databases, SAP systems, and Excel
spreadsheets. It will take the IT organizationʼs awareness to ensure there is no overload
on querying or acquiring certain data sets into Power BI.

Transforming data
Power BI has an incredible ETL tool embedded in it called Power Query. This hidden gem
can clean and transform data efficiently and effectively, automating almost 50 to 70% of
daily activities that analysts have historically done. In most cases, there is no requirement
for a specific ETL tool because you can do the transformations and combine data sources
within Power BI itself.

Do not underestimate the power of putting a tool such as Power Query in an everyday
userʼs hands. Once they understand its capabilities and the abilities to automate
repetitive and lowvalue tasks, you will get an immense amount of buy-in and excitement

Familiar formula language

Power BI has the DAX formula language built into the product and enables high-level
analytics for the everyday user. It is straightforward for any Excel skillset to move over to
Power BI due to the similarities between Excel and DAX formula languages.

Visualization

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Rapid distribution
Power BI online serviceʼs distribution capabilities enable data consumption at
considerably faster speeds instead of infrequent meetings and ineffective email
distribution of spreadsheet information.

Complete toolset
Power BI is the complete tool, maybe not for every single use case but most use cases –
even within large multinational organizations. You must recognize that every organization
in the world uses Excel, and Power BI is no different – it is just a considerably better tool.
Users can achieve so much more by using Power BI than any other workflow in the past.

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IMPLEMENTATION PITFALLS

Where can implementation fail and what to watch out for?

Implementation
Many things can hinder or halt a successful Power BI implementation and these need to be
monitored if you are looking to develop a real long-term data culture within your organization
effectively.

Must do:
•• Getting buy-in from key stakeholders is crucial. Once you have the backing of these
stakeholders, you will find that the right level of importance is placed on the execution of
your analytical workflows. Without this, it will unlikely succeed in implementing Power BI, and
the value extraction will be limited.

•• Strong collaboration with the IT and technical parts of an organization is also a crucial aspect
of success. Without their support and the knowledge and experience of the current data
infrastructure, the impact of your Power BI implementation will be limited. There needs to be
strong communication and planning around extracting data from existing systems.
— Enable the right security features within the Power BI suite for data governance
— Manage data storage
— Maintain the data pipelines so the right information can filter through to the correct
endpoints and power the reports

Avoid:
•• Prevent the silo activities of different business units as there
is a strong chance of duplication of work
•• Inconsistencies around development that will hinder your
analytical culture efforts

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26

SKILLS & RESOURCES

Do you have the skills and resourcing available to make it

happen?
Learning Curve
Many things can hinder or halt a successful Power BI implementation and these need to be
monitored if you are looking to develop a real long-term data culture within your organization
effectively.

•• Start with Power BI

•• Create simple reports
•• Utilize a wide variety of functionality embedded into the toolset

High-quality development
But to develop proficient uses of Power BI, there certainly are some learnings required around
various pillars of high-quality development. Enterprise DNA educates analysts to produce
valuable work and to utilize the best practices in using Power BI. Within any organization, you
want:
•• Consistency
•• To quickly understand what models are designed and built within any part of an organization
•• To ensure that you are building the continuity into your Power BI deployment
•• To see efforts compound for the most significant business value

The earlier you can educate and embed best practices into your analystʼs workflows and those

A superior engine
There should be no organization that cannot create the resources required to implement Power
BI effectively. It is almost a given that business analysis occurs within Microsoft Excel. This
work should be transferred to Power BI as soon as possible because it is a far more effective
analytical, visualization and distribution engine for your data insights. Organizations that
understand their data will undoubtedly improve their competitive position.

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27

SUCCESSFUL GOVERNANCE
Why you should set up a Power BI Center of Excellence?

Successful Governance

Power BI has come a long way

from its earliest incarnations
to deliver a range of seamless
security and governance
features. It is now easy
to place settings on your
organizationʼs Power BI
subscriptions that manage
users' ability to distribute data
and information to the right
people.

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28

CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Why you need Enterprise DNA’s Power BI Center of

Excellence?

Why you need Enterprise DNA’s Power BI Center of Excellence?

•• You understand for organization-wide success, you need a centralized
strategic platform to manage key stakeholders, technology, and business
requirements.
•• You want a rapid deployment model that speaks the language of the
business user.
•• You want to prevent multiple, uncoordinated, ongoing BI implementations.
•• You may be missing a formal approach to documenting processes, creating
content, or facilitating ongoing maintenance or usage.
•• You need to align business intelligence content with corporate objectives
and strategies.
•• You need a firm-wide training and education strategy specifically catered
towards unique learning objectives.
•• You require a centralized adoption strategy that not only promotes adoption
but monitor and supports ongoing adoption and success.
•• You need to ensure the consistent application of standards and governance
across the organization.
•• You need to understand best practices for the design and successful
distribution and consumption of analytics information.

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