Discipline at the Core, Flexibility at the Edge
I’m preparing to teach the brand new Analytics in a Day course by Microsoft. This course emphasizes the business value and technical fundamentals for implementing a modern cloud DW using Azure Synapse, ADF, Data Lake, and Power BI. The second half of the class is focused on Power BI and its role for creating organizational semantic models and self-service models from Synapse. I liked the best practices that Microsoft shares based on how they’ve adopted BI over years and challenges they faced with self-service BI, including:
- Inconsistent data definitions, hierarchies, metrics, KPIs
- Analysts spending 75% of their time collection and compiling data
- 78% of reports being creating in “offline environments”
- Over 350 centralized finance tools and systems
- Approximately $30M annual spend on “shadow applications”
Indeed, many vendors tout only self-service BI which can quickly lead to chaos. By contrast, I have found that most successful data-driven organizations have both organizational and self-service BI.
Microsoft calls the collection of these best practices “Discipline at the Core, Flexibility at the Edge“.
“Discipline at the Core” is organizational BI where IT retains control to:
- Deliver standardized and performant corporate BI (single version of truth)
- Define consistent taxonomies, hierarchies, and KPIs
- Enforce data permissions centrally.
“Flexibility at the Edge” is self-service BI where data analysts:
- Quickly create reports sourced from trusted data
- Mashup core data with departmental data
- Create new metrics and KPIs relevant to their part of the business
I further recommend the 80/20 rule as a rough guideline, where most of the effort (as much as 80%) goes into integration and curating the data, implementing enterprise models, and enforcing security, and 20% is left for the agility of self-service BI.
Is your organization disciplined at the core, or is the core missing as a result of blind adherence to the self-service BI mantra?
