Like many others before us, the company I work for initially approached reporting and analytics as a team sport – but we only let a very select few people play. Our business looked on as mere spectators – demanding more and more from the small group of elite people given the opportunity to take the field.
It was very clear to me from my very first weeks at the company 4 years ago that there were incredibly capable data and analytics people embedded in every function and every location. They were all solving complex analytics problems – but all doing it in different ways and with only limited tools at their disposal. We very quickly created a small community of these fellow data geeks and we documented the problems we saw and what we would like to do about them. The problems were all the ones that you hear throughout the D&A world – “I can’t trust the data because of poor quality in source systems”, “I spend 80% of my time wrangling data and only 20% using it”, “By the time I’ve brought the data together for analysis it is out of date” and “we all do the same things with the same data – wasting effort”.
We’ve worked really hard to solve all these problems and we’ve made a lot of progress – but there was one more problem I’ve not mentioned yet – and it was probably the most important – “I have to rely on IT for everything and I feel that I have no control and my expertise is ignored”.
Our solution to this problem has been to shift the balance between central IT analytics delivery and self service analytics – much more in favour of self service. I appreciate there is nothing new here and that we are in fact “late to the party” – but I feel that we’ve progressed more quickly than average so the lessons we’ve learned may help others. In May 2019, we had only 2-3 people “playing” with Power BI Desktop and no real presence in the service. As at 30th June 2021, we had 991 people regularly consuming reports in Power BI, and 180 people around our company regularly building new content.
What excites me the most about this is that our community is “self sustaining” – there is no formal IT support. Our report creators meet up regularly – sharing their latest work, helping others with questions and the very best run their own training for new community members. The community members include people from IT, Finance, Supply Chain, HR, Commercial, Manufacturing, R&D – the list is endless. Some of the most satisfying moments have been when one person has shown a report they’ve built and another person has come back a few weeks later with a report using the same concepts for a completely different use case.
For example, one of our very best community members built an interactive seating chart for our busiest office location using the synoptic panel visual from OKViz (see https://synoptic.design/). He demonstrated this and a few weeks later I saw an amazing inventory report using the same technique showing all the locations in our warehouse. This is when I really knew we were doing something right.
In the next post, I’ll talk about our journey – selecting Power BI, getting the first people started and putting in place the building blocks to make adoption rapid and successful.
The Meloro Fabric Blog 