how to ensure your microsoft bi project is a success!

Ed Senez –President & Co-Founder@edsenez; ed@unlimitedviz.com September 24, 2014

HOW TO ENSURE YOUR MICROSOFT BI PROJECT IS A SUCCESS!

..and how to avoid ship wrecks like this one…

Agenda Business Intelligence (BI) –defined A Roadmap to Success Demo –A BI Experience Microsoft BI – The Swiss Army Knife 10 Secrets From the Field

Not on the Agenda Big Data

HDInsight & Hadoop Licensing

BI –A Top Corporate Initiative

How I Define Business Intelligence

The transformation of data into meaningful and useful insights

to support decision processes.

BI Architecture 101

Data Marts

Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL)

Middleware Server(s)

DataWarehouse

StorageDesign and Visualization

Data Cubes and Tabular Models

E

T

L

Reporting Server(s)

BI and Designer Clients

Source data

The conundrumBusiness

Knows the requirement A little about technology Frustration leads to governance

violations I’ll get it myself!

IT Knows the technology A little about the business Frustrations, leads to invalid

deployments of technology I’ll just build it!

Results in the wild west

“Traditional” BI(Waterfall)

• Monolithic projects

• Expensive tools

• Few users (execs)

• Results come over years

Agile BI(Agile/Lean)

• Small targeted projects

• Inexpensive tools

• Many users (execs & field)

• Quick targeted results

Two Approaches

Agile BI –Forrester TM

Spawned from “The Age of The Customer” Business agility

Ability to manage change Information agility

Gather customer and market knowledge and rapidly incorporate it into decisions

Most organizations are nowhere near to this

The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2014

Your Roadmap to Success1. Align to the business

2. Understand your corporate culture

3. Current state assessment

4. Create a pitch deck

5. Agile requirements gathering approach

*This is both a list and a loop cycle

Create a Pitch DeckBusiness objectiveProject definitionPurpose of the projectWhere we have come fromWhere we are goingLearningsAction StepsThe ASK –what do you need from them?*You may need more than 1 deck. Keep refining it.

Interview the C’s & LOB’s Start with the metrics that they track today

Existing reports How can they be improved (trends/variance/timeliness

etc) What’s hard to do today?

What matters most to them? Is it Variety, Velocity, or Volume of data?

Define Use Cases –don’t get too carried away What piece of data, if you had it today can:

Make You Money; Save You Money; Create New Opportunity

Corporate Culture Do you have a culture or measurement? Top-down or bottom-up? People do not like to be measured

*Don’t start by creating battles..

Current State Assessment Create a maturity model

by assessing – Systems where data

resides Quality of your data Existing tools Can be simple

E.g. 9/3/1scoring

Focus on Problem Solution Fit Our outcome from the Canvas

is to develop a “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP)

…with an appropriate way to measure a hypothesis and then we test to see if our hypothesis is true or not.

Look for pockets of success

Build, Measure, Learn

A BI Experience

The State of the World

The Swiss Army Knife

SQL Server Data ToolsPower View

Power Query

Power Q&A

Excel Services

PerformancePoint Services

PowerPivot for SharePoint

Power BI

On Premises & Cloud

Excel OnlyPerformancePoint

SSRS OnlySharePoint Mashup

On Premises Cloud

Azure VMs

ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY

RETURN HIS RAW DATA FROM THE DATABASE

EE

Microsoft enterprise (classic) BI

SQL Server DBSQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

SharePoint (with)• Excel Services• PowerPivot for SharePoint• SSRS SharePoint Mode• PerformancePoint

SQL Server DB

StorageDesign and Visualization

SQL Server Analysis Services

Multidimensional and Tabular modes

L

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

ExcelSQL Data ToolsReport Builder3rd party tools

ETL

E

T

Source data

Microsoft personal BI (All in Excel)

Worksheets

Tabular Data Model (xVelocity)

Pivot Charts and Tables

Power View (Analytic reports)

Power Map (Geospatial and time series data)

Power Pivot (Model design)

Power Query (ETL)

Power Pivot Import (EL)

Team BI and SharePoint Dashboards

Power Pivot Worksheets• Pivot Tables and Charts• Power View

Data Marts and other

Data Cubes and Tabular

Models

Standard Worksheets• Pivot Tables and Charts

PerformancePoint Reports• Analytic Charts and Grids• Decomposition trees

SQL Server Reporting Services Reports• Standard• Power View

PerformancePoint Scorecards and KPIs

Secrets from the field#10 Users Lie –usually unintentionally

Data requirements evolve

#9 Inspect for yourself Be certain data isn’t being manipulated manually

#8 Work out loudKeep everyone on the project team informed at all times

Secrets from the field#7 Business and IT side by side

Buy coffee and donuts for IT

#6 Pick targeted metrics –carrot metrics

#5 Harvest the data into a PowerPivot Model Build visualizations and work with the users Note how they work with the data

Secrets from the field#4 Security can eat you up

Often who has access will drive design decisions ETL can save you –only extract what the user needs

# 3 Train your users

#2 Show your data some love and it will serve you better Data curation; data stewardship; governance

Secrets from the field#1 It’s a journey, not a destination

Q&A/Cheap advice

@edsenezed@unlimitedviz.com