Building and Evolving a Community Around Power BI

Creating a Power BI Community of Practice (CoP) is a fundamental step toward fostering a collaborative and data-driven culture within an organization. As this community matures, it can evolve into a Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BI CoE), which significantly enhances the organization’s data analytics capabilities.

The Forrester Consulting's Total Economic Impact™ study of Power BI reveals several benefits to building a community around Power BI:

• A 2.5% increase in operating income
• 22.6% faster solutions quoting
• Reducing time-to-market from 18 months to 10 months for new products and services
• Savings of 125 hours per BI user per year through self-service
• Reducing centralized analytics team effort by 42%​

Here’s an in-depth look at the importance of building this community and the benefits of evolving it into a CoE.

A Power BI CoP aims to bring together employees from various departments who are interested in leveraging Power BI for data analysis and reporting. The primary objectives of a Power BI CoP include developing a robust understanding of Power BI and best practices in data modeling, facilitating the exchange of knowledge and expertise between business units and IT, and providing a platform for feedback and collaboration on data analytics projects.

Additionally, the CoP enhances visibility into enterprise-wide data initiatives, helping to break down data silos and redundancy. By fostering a collaborative environment, the CoP not only accelerates learning but also drives innovation and efficiency in data analytics across the organization.

To successfully establish a Power BI Community of Practice, it’s essential to lay a solid foundation with clear objectives and accessible resources. Here are the key initial steps to get your CoP up and running smoothly:

1. Identify Different Audiences: Determine Power BI content creators vs. content consumers and curate the resources for these two groups.
2. Establish a Dedicated SharePoint Site: This site will serve as a central repository for resources, including best practices, recorded sessions (Power Hours), and documentation.
3. Define an Intake Process: Implement a process for logging issues, collecting user feedback, and prioritizing requirements.
4. Conduct Regular Power Hours: Schedule weekly sessions where users can present their reports, share insights, and discuss challenges.
5. Gather User Feedback: Conduct surveys to understand user needs and tailor the CoP activities accordingly.

1. Robust Communication Plan: Ensure all employees are informed about the CoP and its benefits. This prevents feelings of exclusion and encourages widespread participation.
2. Role Identification: Identify potential Citizen Data Engineers and Citizen Power BI Engineers who will act as liaisons between business units and IT, facilitating smoother collaboration.
   • Citizen Data Engineer:
   • Responsibilities: These individuals bridge the gap between business needs and IT capabilities. They work closely with business stakeholders to gather requirements and collaborate with IT to design and implement data solutions.
   • Skills: Proficient in data modeling, ETL processes, and understanding business workflows. They must also have strong communication skills to effectively translate business needs into technical specifications. Additionally, they must have a solid understanding of the existing enterprise data architecture and contribute to the evolution of data architecture to support repeatable and scalable data analytics.
   • Citizen Power BI Engineer:
   • Responsibilities: These engineers are responsible for creating and maintaining Power BI reports and dashboards. They ensure that the visualizations meet business requirements and are optimized for performance. They also collaborate with Citizen Data Engineers and IT to understand what types of analytics are feasible given the current data architecture and how it must mature to anticipate future data analytics roadmap.
   • Skills: Expertise in Power BI, including DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) and Power Query. They should also have a good grasp of data visualization best practices and user experience design.

• Intake Process: A structured intake process using tools like Power Apps and SharePoint to capture, evaluate, and prioritize analytics requirements.
• Enhanced Collaboration: The CoE fosters a new model of collaboration between IT and business units, ensuring alignment on goals, timelines, and resource allocation.
• Action Priority Matrix: A framework to assess and prioritize data analytics projects based on impact and effort, ensuring the most critical projects are addressed first. The Action Priority Matrix helps in evaluating and prioritizing analytics projects by categorizing them based on their impact and effort. This matrix allows organizations to:
  • Identify Quick Wins: Projects with high impact and low effort are prioritized as they deliver immediate value.
  • Focus on Major Projects: High impact and high effort projects are crucial for long-term success and are planned meticulously.
  • Avoid Time Wasters: Low impact and high effort projects are generally avoided as they consume resources without significant benefits.
  • Delegate or Deprioritize Low Effort and Low Impact Projects: These can be assigned to less critical timelines or delegated as necessary.

Transforming a Power BI Community of Practice into a Business Intelligence Center of Excellence brings numerous advantages to an organization. Here are some of the key benefits that a BI CoE can offer:

• Streamlined Processes: With a well-defined intake process, projects move from ideation to execution more efficiently.
• Improved Data Quality: Regular collaboration between IT and business units helps identify and resolve data quality issues.
• Accepted Data Architecture: Developing an enterprise-wide accepted data architecture and evolution of data architecture helps accommodate repeatable and scalable analytics.
• Curated Unified Datasets: The curation of unified datasets that area available across the enterprise should be backed by an established data governance process.
• Unified Analytics: Moving away from siloed data practices towards a unified approach, leading to more accurate and reliable insights.
• Increased Agility: The CoE can adopt agile methodologies to respond quickly to changing business needs and priorities.

Consider a scenario where a company without a CoP faces delays and inefficiencies due to fragmented data practices. Business units worked in silos, using different tools and methodologies, which led to inconsistent reporting and no cohesive insights. By establishing a CoP, the company was able to set goals, share reports, discuss challenges and learn from each other early on. As the company’s CoP gained momentum, they evolved into a Center of Excellence, an easy transition to a more structured intake process using Power Apps and SharePoint. This allowed them to capture, evaluate, and prioritize analytics requirements efficiently. Collaboration between data teams and business units improved, leading to faster project delivery, better decision-making, and reduced work in silos.

Building a Power BI Community of Practice is a crucial step in harnessing the full potential of data analytics within an organization. As this community evolves into a Center of Excellence, it brings about transformative changes in how business units and IT collaborate, ultimately leading to a more data-driven and agile organization. By following a methodical approach to setting up and scaling the CoP, organizations can achieve significant improvements in their data analytics capabilities and drive better business outcomes.