Disclaimer: This is a tools focussed post. Before anyone comments, I know that self service BI isn’t just about the tools. I’ll talk in other posts about the organisational, governance and process aspects of our journey!
When I started my company on our journey towards self service analytics 2 years ago , I really didn’t know the key BI tools in the market place very well. I’ve spent a lot of my career in data governance and my BI expertise was focussed on SAP technology. This included SAP Business Objects (SAP BO) connected to SAP Business Warehouse on HANA. Business Objects started life in the 90’s and although it has moved with the times, in my view, I didn’t see it as a direct competitor to tools such as QlikSense, Tableau and Power BI.
I needed to get a lot of information quickly about the potential options and work out the best fit for our company. I won’t spend a lot of time here in my humble blog talking about the differences between the leading tools – Gartner and other similar organisations do a great job of that and go into far more depth than I will try to here.
What I will do is tell you about the two things which really moved the needle for those of us who made the decision for my company.
Firstly, we compared the license costs for the tools – however much we wanted to make case based on total cost of ownership, it is obviously helpful if the basic “price is right”. We wanted a simple licensing model. It was important to us that people who would just “view” reports developed by others should not need a named license. Power BI premium was a good fit here – we pay for named user licenses for those who build reports (Pro accounts), but we pay for Premium so that anyone in the company can consume. This has been a big driver for adoption because there is an instantaneous ability for report creators to share their findings with people without waiting for IT to “grant something”.
Secondly, we wanted a tool which was going to be a leader for a long time to come. For this aspect, I looked at the recent history of the BI market and upcoming trends. In this article from Gartner, the trend which caught my eye was augmented analytics. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, the huge software vendors (e.g. Microsoft, SAP, etc) led the way in the BI space with what we now call traditional tools – SAP BO is an example of this. Tableau and Qlik did an amazing job in disrupting the dominance of these vendors with their interactive, self service and user experienced driven tools and “stole a march” on their larger rivals. Between 2006 and 2015, these two organisations found their way into most BI estates. Power BI is the “new kid on the block” being first released in its current form in 2015, but 6 years on is the market leader in the last 3 Gartner Magic Quadrants. This rapid development impressed me, but also my feeling was that this leadership will only grow.
Coming from one of the “huge software vendors” as I called them before – the Power BI team can benefit from the work of other teams at Microsoft and combine different technology together. For example, if we agree that Augmented Analytics is the next big trend, my assumption is that the AI/ML teams at Microsoft are well placed to provide world class support to their Power BI colleagues – and in fact I think you can see that in the recent direction of the product. The Covid crisis has also led to greater investment in collaboration products like Teams and I think that the tight integration between Power BI and Teams will be another driver of Power BI as a leader. Personally I think as our workforces become dominated by what people term as “digital natives” in years to come, people will start to see Power BI just as another standard tool that virtually everyone uses day to day. For example, “if I write a document I use Word”, “if I need to present to a meeting, I use Powerpoint” – is it such a big jump to say “if I need to present data to someone, I use Power BI”? I know certain aspects feel difficult to some people today, e.g. DAX – but in a world where coding has been taught to our workforce since primary school and where AI allows simple expressions to be created from a users entry of natural language – why not?
After selecting Power BI, we ran a pilot to prove that it would be a good fit for our company. We identified a small number of people with an existing interest – from our supply chain, manufacturing, quality and commercial departments, and we trained them. For this we needed help. This is where I met Asgeir Gunnarsson for the first time. Asgeir is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and I got his details through a colleague in our commercial team who had worked with his previous company before. We met Asgeir, talked through our need and understood his approach to training. 2 weeks later, we met in Liverpool and our first 20 trainees (including me) got started with Power BI.
It was a big moment for me personally. Having spent a lot of my career getting data ready for people to do analytics work on (through data governance), this really lit a fire in me to start developing insights on the data I’d worked so hard to cleanse. I found myself enthralled by Power BI for the entire 3 hour train journey home and I haven’t stopped since.
More in the next post on how this first pilot of 20 people grew and developed into the community we have today.
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