Is PowerBI aBusiness Game Changer?

@henk4excel

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Personal- or corporate documents: the key to success.

First things first:• Personal documents are personal documents. • Corporate documents are corporate documents.

Personal documents (made by you and yourself):• Are made by you, maintained by you and (original) used by you.• Are “hanging out” somewhere on a server / in the cloud / on an USB stick / on OneDrive / or even on a floppy disk.• Used to have some kind of “single version of the truth” (until email and shared locations came around).• Most of the time “easy come, easy go”, but always easy to adopt new insights.• Are, if not correct build expensive, otherwise it is CHEAP.

Corporate documents (made by ICT and / or BI departments):• Are not made by you, not maintained by you, but you may “looky, looky, not touchy, touchy”.• Are placed on a structural place (dedicate server, cloud solutions).• Always carry a “Single version of the truth” (let’s say it should).• Not easy to come, but if they arrive they will be there for ever. It will never (and I repeat: never) adopt new insights.• Never cheap, always EXPENSIVE.

@henk4excel

Personal Excel in personal documents

@henk4excel

Lotus 1-2-3 was a killer application on the IBM PCand Excel became a

Business Game Changer?

@henk4excel

The very first corporate document ever found

And it looks like Excel, because of the cell structure.(made around 4500 BC and baked in clay)

Did you notice the error?

@henk4excel

Excel in your company.

Do you know the costs of Excel?

• Ever calculated how many hours are monthly spend by managers to update their Excel dashboards?• Do you know how many – potentially very costly - errors there might be on a average Excel workbook?• Ever counted the number of Excel files your company owns?• Do you have a clue how many critical Excel files your company owns?

@henk4excel

Excel deep dive / real problemsIn this small section of an Excel workbook there are three basic structural errors. Who’s recognizing them?

1

2

3

@henk4excel

The Excel hell

• Governance in our Excel world. No way, long live our freedom. Feel free to make your own world.

• Everybody is an expert in Excel (he or she thinks ).• A single version of the truth is in this age (nearly) impossible.• Different versions of an model are with different users, on different places, on different planets, on…• Ever tried to find a Excel workbook you made a half year ago. And did you find the correct version?• So the previous employee (now working somewhere near the North pole) left you his beautiful Excel

model. Can you read it?• So your manager gives you his great idea of a business model in Excel. Again can you read it?• To rephrase a famous English PM: “Never in the field of business were so much manual actions owed

by so few calculations”.

So Excel was a Business Game Changer some time ago, but nowadays…

@henk4excel

How to end the Excel hell.

The Excel user has two roles:1. The designer / builder2. The user(this applies to for PowerBI!).

• There are typical designers / builders and typical users. Don’t let an user ever build a Excel model.• Organize designers / builders in every department: they are responsible for building and maintaining

Excel models. But they need to know the business as well.• The users make there decisions based on the models build by the designers / builders.• Make corporate rules how to build Excel models: if one designer / builder leave, there is no gap in the

reporting sequences.• Organize regular meeting between the designers / builders. They learn from other man’s model and do

make a firm platform for a corporate standard in how to use Excel.

@henk4excel

@henk4excel

So the questions is: Are you aware that, like Excel use to be in the old days,

PowerBI really is a Business Game Changer?

@henk4excel

Power pivot (in PowerBI) deliverspersonal documents

andCorporate documents

@henk4excel

Power Pivot seen as the heart of Power BI

What is new with Power Pivot?• It is new. Coming on the market in around 2010 and using lighting fast internal memory.• It supports personal and corporate documents. It’s the first application I know of, that supports this

feature.• It’s filtering based and it will filter the hell out of you.• It sometime behave like a plague: you will find it everywhere, even in PowerBI.

So is everything great?• Nope.• DAX is more difficult then Excel functions.• Relations? Nice on the beach with a beautiful ….• Let’s show the potentials of Excel, Power Pivot and PowerBI.

Easy

difficult

ExcelPower PivotPower

Query

@henk4excel

Easy:Power QueryPower PivotPublishPowerAppsEtc.

Difficult:R sciptingDatabase connectivityREST connectionsCustum visualisationsRow level securityEtc.

Power Pivot seen as the heart of Power BI

What is new with Power Pivot?• It is new. Coming on the market in around 2010 and using lighting fast internal memory.• It supports personal and corporate documents. It’s the first application I know of, that supports this

feature.• It’s filtering based and it will filter the hell out of you.• It sometime behave like a plague: you will find it everywhere, even in PowerBI.

So is everything great?• Nope.• DAX is more difficult then Excel functions.• Relations? Nice on the beach with a beautiful ….• Let’s show the potentials of Excel, Power Pivot and PowerBI.

Easy

difficult

ExcelPower PivotPower

Query

Power BI

@henk4excel

Easy:Power QueryPower PivotPublishPowerAppsEtc.

Difficult:R sciptingDatabase connectivityREST connectionsCustum visualisationsRow level securityEtc.

The flavours of Power Pivot

Personal(Excel)

Corporate(AS)

Personal andCorporate(PowerBI)

@henk4excel

So what is the essence of PowerBI desktop?

DATADATA

DATA

DATA

Filters• Relation between tables

• Calculations

.COM

DESKTOP

@henk4excel

PowerBI in Corporate documents (PowerBI.com)

SSAS 2008 R2 en >

Powerpivot

Excel 2010 and aboveExcel O365PowerBI desktop

Personal devices(PowerBI.com or

SharePoint (on-line))

Exceldashboard

On-prem of (Azure) cloud cloud solutions

PowerBI.com

Powerpivot

On prem of (PowerBI) cloud solutions

User User

Designer Builder

@henk4excel

Is PowerBI aBusiness Game Changerin your organization?

@henk4excel

Business and Business Intelligence ?????

@henk4excel

The managers and the BI process.

Data storage and retrieve

Data massageETL

CalculationsOutput

DashboardsSharing

It seems for the Business manager that time is not an issue for Bi pro’s

Managers knowlegde

But that manager wants his dashboard NOW

BI stages

@henk4excel

Is Power BI part of your solution? Part 1

How about visualizations? Definitely.• Lots of standard visualizations.• Do-it-yourself Custom Visuals.

Is PowerBI a Self-Service BI tool? Definitely.• Suitable for all sorts of models.• It can be the exit of the Excel hell. • It might be a blueprint for Managed BI.• R, machine learning, Q&A.

Does PowerBI has safety issues? Definitely.• Old state of mind: local data storage.• Personal documents can become a PowerBI hell.• Subset of database in .pbix files.

Is PowerBI future proof? Definitely.• Unlimited possible integrations.• Azure in the cloud.

How about visualizations? No way.• Making a good dashboard is an art.• Do-it-yourself Custom Visuals.

Is PowerBI a self-service BI tool? No way.• Excel needs abstract thinking, PowerBI even more.• Not everybody’s piece of cake: it needs expertise.• Large range of consumers: from Business users to

the very pro’s in BI.

Does PowerBI has safety issues? No way.• New state of mind: Cloud data storage.• AS on-prem or Azue in the cloud.• Row level security in AS.

Is PowerBI future proof? No way.• Nope (just kidding)

@henk4excel

Is Power BI part of your solution? Part 2

Is PowerBI Excel’s killer app? No way.• Excel is capable of doing deeper analyses.• You still can do great things in Excel.• Installed base of Excel.

Is PowerBI mature enough? No way.• Fast live has it’s high risk.• PowerBI has a lot of (new born) bugs.

Do you think DAX is easy? No way.• Advantage calculations can be a pain in the ….• Steep learning curve: DAX is just for fanatics.• Filter rather then calculate, so less calculations.• Not much knowledge on structuring.

Is PowerBI Excel’s killer app? Definitely.• Ever deploy Excel from a development version

into a production version ?• Cloud-2-cloud, personal-2-cloud,

personal2personal.

Is PowerBI mature enough? Definitely.• You can connect with every flavor of database.• Dashboards on your mobile devices.• Integration with O365.

Do you think DAX is easy? Definitely.• Simple calculations can be simple.• Some DAX looks like Excel functions.• There are much examples found on internet.

@henk4excel

The real solution: meet the data steward.

@henk4excel

He / she is• the in-between the BI department and the business units.• ideally coming from the business and knows the business.• most likely the more advantage Excel user.• interested in data and data modelling.• the only one that is allowed to build data models in Excel or PowerBI.• finding relevant business data inside or outside the company.

What is the function of a data steward?

The data steward and self –service BI

Data storage and retrieve

Data massageETL

CalculationsOutput

DashboardsSharing

The data steward’s knowlegde

The manager GET his dashboard NOW (OK, may be tomorrow)

BI stages

@henk4excel

Governance or die…

So here are a few steps you need to take care of…• Business islands are hard to break down . You need all the support of the “C’s” in the company

(but shown them a PowerBI dashboard on your iPad. Bet that they want it).• Start organizing teams that work with PowerBI, don’t let everybody get their hands on it.• Invest not only in PowerBI (that is cheap), but also in education for date stewards.• Make corporate rules. Think about:

• The relation between BI and business.• Where what is stored (keep track of versions of critical KPI models).• Tell users that they have a data steward next to them, who makes the personal- and the (non-

critical) corporate desktops.

If that is not possible..• Start at your own department, shown everybody the changes.

@henk4excel

Is PowerBI a Business Game Changer?

O yes, it is (or will be).

• Speed and better insight in data will determine the success factor of a company.• We change towards business that are rules by data driven decisions.• And it’s coming faster then you can imagine.

@henk4excel

Henk Vlootman, Excel and Data platform MVP

henk@vlootman.nl www.vlootman.nl06 - 54 97 44 87

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlootman

http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/mvp/Henk%20Vlootman-5000207

Is PowerBI aBusiness Game Changer?

@henk4excel