The growing importance and relevance of leveraging data and business intelligence cannot be overstated in today’s highly digitized business landscape. The business intelligence (BI) market size is projected to reach $39.35 billion by 2027. Amongst the plethora of BI tools and solutions available in the market, Microsoft Power BI has emerged as the leading BI software, commanding a 36% market share in 2021.
What is Power BI?
To put it in simple words, Microsoft Power BI is an advanced business intelligence, visualization, and data reporting tool that allows the derivation and sharing of meaningful business insights throughout the organization, supported by powerful integrations with other renowned Microsoft products and services.
As organizations worldwide are committed to fostering a data-driven culture in a highly fast-paced business landscape, Microsoft customers rely heavily on Power BI to push forth that change, address economic realities, and make managed self-service business intelligence (SSBI) a reality.
But successfully cultivating a data culture is not merely about implementing the technology. While the technology fuels the engine, it takes more than just deploying the right tools and solutions to set the gears turning.
To drive home the greatest impact and shift in mindset towards a data-fuelled environment, it is essential to be mindful of specific considerations that directly affect the success of Power BI adoption.
Let’s explore further.
Considerations that directly affect the success of Power BI adoption
To effectively build an engaged pool of employees that actively adopts Power BI, organizations must consider certain aspects that enable change management within the company and allow successful adoption.
Change management is a complex process involving a series of stages that include
- Developing awareness,
- Inculcating understanding of the technology,
- Gaining momentum in usage and adoption
- Driving complete, proficient, and adequate adoption
All these encompass a significant part of how users actively use Power BI, i.e., how they consume data and content and how creators generate it for them to consume. It is not about the quantitative aspect, i.e., usage statistics or the number of users. Instead, the qualitative element or how prudently and effectively Power BI is used is what makes the technology beneficial.
Therefore, successfully adopting Power BI implies integrating the right processes, tools, and data into everyday work patterns for creators, consumers, and other stakeholders. In the best-case scenario, adoption should align across other Power platforms and services, including Power Automate and PowerApps.
Below, we discuss the priorities, workstreams, and considerations that lay down the pathway for successful Power BI adoption.
1. Always remember, data is the key!
Building a robust data culture is the backbone of successful Power BI adoption. It is about choosing habits and behaviors that encourage data-informed decision-making, based purely on analytics, and by all stakeholders throughout the enterprise.
2. Strategy management
The most important component of strategy and program management is securing executive buy-in and sponsorship. While aligning program goals, resources, and budget to corporate goals is a must, there is nothing/no one more essential than an executive sponsor with the credibility and influence to drive effective adoption of Power BI.
Another vital component of strategic management of the technology would be to decide how Power BI content will be owned or managed, i.e., business-led self-service (owned by creators and SMEs), enterprise BI (owned by a centralized team, be it the IT, BI, or COE), and managed self-service (owned by the centralized team; reports managed by business users).
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3. Decide who all will consume the Power BI content
Power BI content may be consumed as per any of the following delivery scopes: personal, team, departmental, or enterprise.
The scope not only influences the content distribution and privacy or who views the Power BI data but also governance best practices, user enablement, and user support.
4. Building a center of excellence (COE) with the right team of SMEs business and technical experts
Consisting of a team of subject-matter and business experts, the center of excellence (COE) forms the heart of the community within the organization that assists all those working with data.
The COE promotes the adoption of Power BI by mentoring and guiding internal users, reducing pain points, and disseminating knowledge across the organization.
5. Data governance must always be at the forefront!
The Data Governance Institute defines data governance as “a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions, with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.”
To ensure optimal and productive adoption of Power BI, it is vital to ensure internal users put data to the best use, comply with industrial regulations, and adhere to internal organizational rules and requirements.
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6. Mentoring, training, enablement, and user support
Mentoring and training users are critical to facilitating Power BI adoption within the established governance policies and guidelines. Moreover, providing users with both formal and informal ways of seeking support, resolving queries, and getting questions answered is a sure-shot way to guarantee higher adoption.
7. Driving social community support
An active community of like-minded individuals who actively implement Power BI in their day-to-day activities and are ready to solve user queries voluntarily has the potential to significantly fuel adoption.
How can Acuvate help?
Acuvate is a Microsoft Gold Partner that leverages Microsoft’s renowned Power Platform to build data-driven organizations and drive agility, efficiency, and cost-efficiency across modern enterprises.
We help clients advance a data culture by deploying and managing Power BI, building a roadmap for effective adoption, and implementing Microsoft’s other suite of services, including Power Automate and Power Apps.
To know more about Power BI implementation and our other services, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
