Introduction to Power BI

Quick reference

• 00:04 Before we dig into how to work with Power BI,
• 00:07 let's answer the question why do we need Power BI at all?
• 00:10 And this is probably best served by thinking back to the old classic reporting
• 00:15 world that we used to live in, which revolved 100% around Microsoft Excel.
• 00:19 This of course, had some big issues.
• 00:21 The number one issue was version control.
• 00:24 This is where you have a specific file and you email it to your boss, and
• 00:28 your boss makes a change to it, and they send it to two of their bosses who both
• 00:32 make changes to it and send it out to the CEO.
• 00:34 And then your boss goes back to his version and makes another change, and
• 00:38 sends it to a couple of different people who make changes, and send it to the CEO.
• 00:42 And the next thing you know the CEO is coming back to you saying, hey,
• 00:44 you were the start of this whole file.
• 00:46 Can you reconcile these changes even though it has gone through a whole
• 00:48 bunch of hands?
• 00:49 This is classically what we call Excel Hell.
• 00:52 The other issue that ran into the classic world was that all of
• 00:57 the reports that Excel were bound to PC or paper.
• 01:00 You either had to be in front of your PC or you had to have paper printed out
• 01:03 in front of you in order to review the results and see what was going on.
• 01:08 Both of these were big issues that really kinda affected the way we distributed our
• 01:12 business intelligence solutions that we built up,
• 01:15 neither of them was really satisfying.
• 01:17 IT decided to take a role in this and help out.
• 01:21 So what they really tried to push for was centralizing all of the business
• 01:25 intelligence into a product called SharePoint.
• 01:28 The challenge with SharePoint is that this was very costly.
• 01:31 As the BI department started building these things,
• 01:33 it led to really long turnaround times.
• 01:35 Cuz they were really trying to scope things out and
• 01:37 figure out what's going on and IT's got a lot of other things to do in their job, so
• 01:41 this became a big problem.
• 01:42 And then eventually, when results were actually delivered, they weren't what
• 01:46 the users expected or needed and this comes from a couple different reasons.
• 01:49 This comes from the fact that maybe the IT department doesn't have the skill set to
• 01:53 be able to do business analysis.
• 01:55 It can also come from the fact that users could not clearly explain or
• 01:58 articulate what they wanted.
• 01:59 And therefore, what was delivered just didn't work.
• 02:03 Now as all this stuff happens, some things start to change.
• 02:06 We start to get more immobile devices and whatnot, and
• 02:09 that drove a big change in the expectations of the end users as well.
• 02:12 So this put additional pressure under the system.
• 02:15 Users today want what they need, when they need it, where they need it.
• 02:19 And this is all about having that mole device and
• 02:22 being able to have access to instant on demand information.
• 02:26 The reality is though that with all of our reports bound to local PC or paper,
• 02:29 it just doesn't work anymore.
• 02:31 Because you're not gonna carry around a big stack of paper with you.
• 02:33 You certainly can't carry your entire PC in your pocket, although you kinda think
• 02:38 maybe that's what your cellphone is leaning towards these days.
• 02:42 In addition, you may have noticed in the last few years that the time pressures
• 02:45 to deliver on information are becoming bigger and bigger.
• 02:48 People expect you to just have things at your fingertips and
• 02:51 that's a big challenge too.
• 02:53 More pressure to deliver faster without the correct tools is a big problem.
• 02:57 The other thing is that we had the wrong skill sets working on the job in the wrong
• 03:01 places and this is where we take the skills of someone like the business
• 03:05 analyst who's train to understand the business, and
• 03:09 we remove from the report development, and we push it back to a group of people
• 03:13 who are really focused around building the IT infrastructure.
• 03:17 Those two things don't work and that's what we really need to do is figure
• 03:21 out a way to get this back to where your accountants, and your analysts.
• 03:24 These are the guys that understand business process.
• 03:27 They're the ones that should be actually working with this information.
• 03:29 Do they need more skill sets?
• 03:30 Absolutely, they do.
• 03:33 However, having in, in the hands of people who really are trained to look after
• 03:37 databases and make sure that information or data rather stored in a consistent
• 03:42 fashion is not the right answer either and this is where Power BI comes in.
• 03:47 Power BI solves a bunch of power for us.
• 03:49 Number one, it gives us interactive access to any of our reports anywhere,
• 03:54 any time on any device.
• 03:56 You wanna pick it up on your computer, you can do that.
• 03:58 You wanna pick it up on your cellphone, you can do that.
• 04:02 This is a fantastic thing and the stuff is interactive now which means you can
• 04:05 click on things, and play with them, and they'll change which is very cool.
• 04:09 Power BI also allows us to restructure our role set.
• 04:13 It puts the analysis back in the hands of the analyst and
• 04:15 it pushes the hosting security, and distribution into the hands of the IT
• 04:19 department, and this is the way it should be.
• 04:22 Why?
• 04:23 Because you know what?
• 04:24 Your IT department is seriously busy.
• 04:27 They've got lots of things to do.
• 04:29 One of the big challenges that we run into is that our bosses keep asking for
• 04:33 stuff that takes a long time to deliver.
• 04:36 And unfortunately, isn't really what they're actually probably after.
• 04:40 So this tool allows us to rapidly prototype to find the business
• 04:43 intelligence that actually sticks.
• 04:45 The stuff that's really worthwhile.
• 04:47 Once we have that and we know that we're using this report over and
• 04:50 over and it's become mission critical to our organization,
• 04:53 this allows us to go back and actually now take it to IT.
• 04:56 And say, hey, listen.
• 04:57 I built something really cool.
• 04:58 Here is what it looks like.
• 05:00 Can you help me do anything to actually clean it up and make it perform a little
• 05:03 bit better, and can you help me go and secure it, and host it, and share it?
• 05:08 And that is what IT is really good at.
• 05:10 So this doesn't waste IT's valuable time on unnecessary projects,
• 05:14 it allows them to focus on things that actually add value and
• 05:17 allows you to focus on things of action add value as well.
• 05:20 So this is a much better cohesive system overall with the right people in the right
• 05:25 place, building the right tools.

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