Four Simple Ways to Improve BI Adoption

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In this episode, Brick and Caleb discuss four simple things you can do to improve BI adoption in your company.

Blue Margin helps private equity owned and mid-market companies organize their data into dashboards to execute on strategy and create a culture of accountability. We call it The Dashboard Effect, the title of our book and podcast. 

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#BI #businessintelligence #adoption #PowerBI #Azure #Synapse

Transcript

Brick Thompson: 0:04

Welcome to The Dashboard Effect Podcast, I'm Brick Thompson.

Caleb Ochs: 0:07

And I'm Caleb Ochs.

Brick Thompson: 0:08

Hey, Caleb, how are you doing?

Caleb Ochs: 0:09

Pretty good. How are you?

Brick Thompson: 0:10

I'm good. All right. So today we're gonna be talking about how to increase Power BI adoption in your company.

Caleb Ochs: 0:18

Yeah, this is not going to be comprehensive, just just a few tips, hopefully that are helpful to some people.

Brick Thompson: 0:25

Yeah. All right. Well, let's start. There's some obvious things that you have to do in terms of having compelling reports that actually help people make decisions, drive behaviors, that type of thing. So that's the starting point, good reporting.

Caleb Ochs: 0:40

Yeah. These tips are not going to be like, "How do you design a really good report, or how do you do those types of things?" But it's more about, you have some good effective reports, we're just going to assume that, and how do you make better use of them?

Brick Thompson: 0:54

Okay, so let's assume that, how do you make better use of them?

Caleb Ochs: 1:00

Well, before anything we'll go over four different things. First one that we've had for as long as I've worked at Blue Margin, so seven years, is just a screen somewhere in the office. There was just one back when we were little. Now we have screens all over the place with reports on them, and they rotate around. And just as you're walking around the office, going into the kitchen or something, you get to see the report. Some of our most important reports are up on those screens.

Brick Thompson: 1:36

Yeah, it seems like we keep putting out more and more of those, too. I've got one of my office, you've got one in your office. And I have them in the break room, we have them out in the main main cubicle area. And actually, there's a couple I want to add. So yeah, that does make them a lot more effective. And a lot of times I'll see something on one of those and then ended up going into Power BI looking up the report itself and digging into it a bit.

Caleb Ochs: 2:01

Yeah. And the cool thing is that Nick, our IT guy, just got some screens, they are borders that go on existing TVs, and then they plug into your computer. And it makes that whole screen, 80 inch TV, a touchscreen. So you can go up to the report, when you're in our break room, for example, we have the report up and you can go up to and you can change pages, or you can click on a data point and cross filter the report, so it's interactive right there to some extent. It's a much better experience on your computer, but you can still do a little bit of that digging around here just talking about right there.

Brick Thompson: 2:37

Yeah, it's kind of amazing. I think those frames are only $250, something like that, to turn a huge TV into a touchscreen. And it works.

Caleb Ochs: 2:47

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Brick Thompson: 2:48

Really cool. All right, what's the next thing you'd recommend for improving adoption.

Caleb Ochs: 2:53

So, we'll say you're not in the office and you're out and about, or you're traveling, or maybe you have remote workforce, or whatever that is, putting those reports onto your phone is a huge benefit.

Brick Thompson: 3:07

Yeah. And actually, Power BI will let you look at any report on your phone. But also, when you're building a Power BI report, you can build a specific mobile version of the report. And then the service itself will know where you're looking at it, and if you're looking at it on an app on a phone, it'll default to that mobile version of the report. So you can take a report that may work great on a screen, but would kind of be small on your phone, and you can just take subsets of it. Maybe some of that data cards and a key graph or two, something like that, and put it on it.

Caleb Ochs: 3:42

Yeah, you can kind of reorient it. You can keep all the content if you want. But it might just look better when you do that mobile version. But like you said, you can, and I just use the normal report version on my phone.

Brick Thompson: 3:55

I do to, and just zoom in and out.

Caleb Ochs: 3:56

Yeah, on the app and use it in landscape mode and it looks great. I look at it in the morning when I'm at the gym. You know, that's a huge benefit.

Brick Thompson: 4:04

Yeah, it is. It can be kind of a negative sometimes too. Like when I wake up in the morning, sometimes I'll roll right over and get,"Alright, how did it go yesterday?" Probably not the best way to start the day, with my eyes on a screen, but I definitely know what's going on.

Caleb Ochs: 4:21

Right.

Brick Thompson: 4:22

All right. What's the next one?

Caleb Ochs: 4:25

So, you can always email those reports out.

Brick Thompson: 4:26

Yeah. So subscriptions.

Caleb Ochs: 4:28

Yep.

Brick Thompson: 4:29

And I have several reports that I get by subscription. I know they're out there on the service so I can look at them, but I just like that I that at certain points in the morning I'm going to get certain reports and just be able to quickly review. It sends you an image of the report in the email, and then you can click on a link and it'll go right to the live report.

Caleb Ochs: 4:50

Yeah, I just had something happen this week where a report changed and I looked back in my emails at those subscriptions that I get every day to see like, where did we start at the beginning of the week? It's actually kind of like a pseudo snapshot of what your data was like, it's actually really handy.

Brick Thompson: 5:09

Yeah, I've used it for that too. So that's a way that, if you want people to be focused on numbers but you're not sure you can get them to remember to go and look, or maybe it just hasn't gotten into their habit to make those numbers important yet, you can just make sure they land in their mailbox. So you don't have to have them subscribe. As an admin, you can subscribe for people. So if you have a report that you want, say, your entire engineering team to get, you can subscribe them all on the back end and have that go out to them.

Caleb Ochs: 5:42

Right. And it's also just a good reminder to go look at the report. I mean, when I started building BI and doing analytics and stuff, and even in the earlier years of Blue Margin, we used to run into a lot of where people did not want to go to Power BI to look at the data. They wanted something to land in their inbox. And now it's shifted, I think by and large a lot, over the past couple of years. But there's still those types of people that just want something in their inbox, and they'll continue going about their day.

Brick Thompson: 6:15

Yeah, I think where I've seen that with our clients is where you have an executive that you used to getting, say, an Excel report every day in their inbox. And you say, "Great, there's a way better version of this out on Power BI," but they say, "No, I like getting it in the inbox." Well, you can sort of have both things happen. Inbox, and it's a better report.

Caleb Ochs: 6:33

Yeah, exactly.

Brick Thompson: 6:36

Okay, number four.

Caleb Ochs: 6:38

Why don't you go over number four?

Brick Thompson: 6:41

So, as part of Power BI you can actually embed reports into web pages. So if you have an intranet for your company, like we do, we have a portal that we go to, you can actually put reporting in there. So if employees are going there to do things like register for vacation time, or change their benefits, something like that, you could have a landing page that has key reports on it. And if you have an intranet that has different areas for different departments, maybe Microsoft Teams, you can embed those reports in there.

Caleb Ochs: 7:15

Yeah, you and Jon have a good story about the impact of this on our SharePoint site.

Brick Thompson: 7:26

Yeah, years ago, when we were helping companies move from sort of local data closet to the cloud, we were doing a lot of SharePoint migrations, because people were using SharePoint for their file stores. And being data guys, even though we were doing a file and intranet migration, we would always put some kind of a BI report on the SharePoint site. And what we found over time, was that clients valued that more than anything else we did. They were like, "Okay, thanks, this stuff all works the way we expect it to, but the report is what we're really excited about, and can you do more of those?" And we were just doing PowerPivot inside of Excel, and embedding those. So when Power BI came along, it was pretty obvious that, "Okay, this is actually where the value is not just not just moving data clauses."

Caleb Ochs: 8:17

Yeah, I remember our SharePoint site, I think it's still alive, but you used to go there. That was the first thing we went to when we came in as an employee. And it had the report of, "Here's our billable hours and utilization percent," and you saw that every day. So it can be very effective tool.

Brick Thompson: 8:35

Definitely can. So I'm sure there's other things that you can do to improve uptake and utilization of reports. But adoption is key. Like if you spend a bunch of money and build a data warehouse, or a bunch of time and effort and build reports, but people don't use them, it was wasted effort. So you've really got to think about this. So obviously start with great reports, but then there's a lot of strategies you can use. And we just talked about four that are pretty simple, and everybody should probably do those four. But there's lots of other stuff you can do too.

Caleb Ochs: 9:13

Right. Yeah, there's just the tip of the iceberg here, but hopefully those are kind of low hanging fruit type ideas to get people rolling with getting their data into people's hands a little bit easier.

Brick Thompson: 9:25

Yeah, and when you want to really get people rolling, then doing user training and various things can help improve it even more.

Caleb Ochs: 9:32

Right.

Brick Thompson: 9:33

All right, I think that's it for today.

Caleb Ochs: 9:35

Sounds good.

Brick Thompson: 9:36

Thanks, Caleb.

Caleb Ochs: 9:36

Thank you.