Driving Power BI Adoption
Deciding upon and getting the appropriate tools is only the first step of the journey to a successful adoption.
You’ve decided on using Microsoft Power BI in your organization but how do you really focus on shifting your organization’s culture to become a data-driven organization? How do you plan to get the most out of your Power BI investment, accelerating time to insights?
Successful adoption requires a change in people, processes, data, and technology. Aligning each of these pieces is a difficult challenge, however when successfully accomplished the business leaders and users are empowered with fast, accurate data to deliver fact-based decision making.
Leveraging a modern analytics and business intelligence platform requires a modern approach, which can be challenging. Successful deployments can only happen with widespread adoption of Power BI throughout the entire organization which ultimately drives the value delivered with the Power BI platform.
There are numerous considerations for your organization if you plan to unlock the potential of the Power BI platform.
- Identify use cases that can deliver tangible value throughout the organization.
- Leverage these use cases to build the supporting business case.
- Determine the deployment model for the organization.
- Work across numerous departments and business units to enable Power BI adoption
- Leveraging a structured approach and framework that accelerates Power BI adoption.
- Building content (Dashboards and Reports) that deliver value to the business community.
- Position self-service analytics as a strategic program leveraging the Power BI platform.
- Receive on-going support and enhancements
A Strong Power BI Business Case
A strong Power BI business case gives business leaders a chance to define success and see how their involvement ultimately drives success. The build it and they will come approach doesn’t work. Successful Power BI implementations are driven to high adoption levels by the business community.
During this journey you will need to consider:
- Develop a data-driven culture with Power BI.
- Evolve your business strategies with agile delivery of BI.
- Structure your approach for self-service BI adoption.
- Get the resources to guide you through Power BI adoption.
- Blending enterprise data sources with self-service and ad-hoc analytics delivers the agility your business needs to keep up with the pace of change.
Selecting a BI application with a flexible, agile architecture that can flex to changing requirements and needs, including supporting embedded analytics
The five technology success factors address the issue of having an agile, flexible BI application that can scale. Flexing across analysis and content creation, data management, infrastructure, and embedded analytics are all essential to set the foundation for businesses to implement business intelligence and grow.
An experienced management team that includes directors, vice presidents and C-level executives who can cut through the cross-functional confusion and get things done
Contrary to the popular belief that it only takes a senior-level management champion, experience has shown that cross-functional teams will often resist change. It often takes a unified effort on the part of senior management to get BI software implementations done; all must be in favor and actively support the effort to break down barriers.
Ensuring data quality from the very beginning of the project is a must-have
Oftentimes, data quality is relegated to the last of a series of factors that companies look at when planning and developing their BI implementation. Data quality needs to be designed in from the very beginning in order to get the maximum results possible, while ensuring that the BI applications being launched deliver data that users can take action on.
A business results-driven development approach needs to underscore all efforts
Always tying back to business factors and the urgency to gain greater insights that can be turned into revenue, emphasizing business results can keep the intensity and focus at a high level until a BI project is completed. Keeping the intensity level up and focused on how BI adoption can drive revenue helps maintain it as a priority until it’s complete.