Energy BI is taking off, and it’s quick turning into the most well-liked enterprise intelligence platform available on the market. It’s straightforward to interact with and get skilled outcomes shortly, making it the proper instrument for organisations seeking to beef up their BI prowess and make knowledge pushed choices through-out the organisation.

On this submit we’re going to take a look at three good practices for implementation and provide the suggestions you could be sure to keep away from widespread pitfalls so you might be on the quick monitor to success with Energy BI in your organisation.

1. Setup a number of environments

When engaged on a Energy BI implementation mission, it’s sensible to have a number of environments to handle the lifecycle of your BI property. Beneath we’ve listed a number of environments that ought to be thought-about relying on the complexity of the mission and your organisation’s wants.

Growth (aka Dev)

Having the ability to carry on prime of the numerous reviews you’re testing, and being able to monitor adjustments that happen, is important as you get setup. And not using a particular Dev setting, your manufacturing setting will shortly turn out to be overwhelmed with property, making it arduous to take care of and handle.  

When working within the dev setting, just remember to have knowledge sources particularly for improvement. We’ve seen manufacturing knowledge utilized in dev on many events which may result in critical privateness and knowledge sovereignty points. Your dev knowledge sources shouldn’t include delicate knowledge. 

These improvement environments will be in your native community or in cloud storage (like OneDrive for Enterprise or GitHub). It is strongly recommended to have separate Workspaces in Energy BI Service for every setting.

Tip: The information sources of all printed reviews to Energy BI Service should be enough for improvement use solely and may keep away from together with confidential knowledge.

Person Acceptance Testing (aka UAT) 

The individuals who will probably be utilizing the reviews day by day are those who must be testing them – they know the enterprise greatest, and can be capable to establish alternatives and gaps that the event workforce could not be capable to establish themselves. By ensuring the consumer is introduced into the method early on, it maximises the worth added to the enterprise.

Person acceptance testing is the final section of testing. The UAT setting ought to solely be created as soon as the answer has been totally examined in Dev and accredited by senior Energy BI builders.

As its identify displays, UAT helps with the general acceptance charge of the answer and drills into the customers’ mindsets. Obtainable solely to a choose group of customers, they may have entry to printed datasets, reviews, and dashboards within the UAT setting for testing functions solely.

Tip:All knowledge sources in Energy BI should be switched from Dev to UAT earlier than being printed to this setting.

Manufacturing (aka Prod)

Prod is an important setting in each organisation because it’s the place the entire mission comes collectively. The answer has been by way of intensive exams throughout improvement, audited by consultants, peer reviewed internally a number of instances and accepted by the top customers in UAT. The iterative course of to get to manufacturing means we will present a greater answer that has extra belief amongst customers. 

This setting consists of actual world knowledge and it’s essential that every Energy BI report has been totally examined earlier than being printed to the “Manufacturing” setting. We’re now utilizing dwell, real-world knowledge so all knowledge sources within the mannequin should be switched from UAT to Prod.

It’s vital to keep in mind that regardless of greatest efforts, issues can go improper when deploying to Prod. Many organisations may have an actual duplicate of Prod appearing as Pre-Prod setting for deployment testing functions. This tends to solely be value efficient in bigger companies the place there are many tasks in play. For smaller organisations, the choice is to convey the UAT setting as shut as potential to Prod (whereas taking into consideration privateness and safety necessities).

Tip: Particular Workspaces must be outlined for every enterprise unit (if relevant).

2. Certify your Information Sources

Reviews are solely nearly as good as the information that populates them, so we have to take steps to maximise the accuracy of our knowledge. Information sources must be reviewed and authorized by knowledge professionals in your organisation and solely licensed knowledge sources must be utilized in Energy BI to make sure you can belief what you’re seeing.

After the inner assessment is completed, you could give you numerous confidence ranges in your completely different knowledge sources. Attempt to categorise your knowledge sources with some self-explanatory names, for instance, Gold, Silver, Bronze. From there you may make the choice to maintain or ban sure knowledge sources from being utilized in your Energy BI implementation, in all Energy BI tasks throughout your organisation. For instance, an organisation could ban all Bronze knowledge sources and solely use Gold and Silver in Energy BI implementation.

Tip: As self-service BI turns into extra widespread, guaranteeing the proper course ofes are in place to make sure that the information getting used will be trustedturns into more and more vital. 

A listing of licensed knowledge sources must be offered to all events concerned in a Energy BI mission and like all the things, make sure that that is documented – which is the proper segway to our closing good follow:

3. Doc your Setup

As we have now seen – a whole lot of work goes into implementing Energy BI in order that it follows greatest practices and delivers worth to your small business. However as folks change inside the organisation and data will get misplaced, you could guarantee you’ve got the proper methods in place to take care of continuity – in any other case you could find yourself having to undergo this course of once more.

Documentation, like certification of information sources, is one other governance course of that you could be sure to’ve thought-about early within the implementation course of. Have a plan round how you’ll strategy it and who will probably be liable for sustaining it so that you will be assured that there’s a central place to show to with data on how the implementation has been accomplished.

Competing brief time period priorities usually imply that documentation is push apart as it’s perceived as time consuming with a longer-term payoff. Nevertheless, with out it, reviews will be tough to work with, arduous to handover and difficult to assessment – costing you considerably extra down the monitor.

Fashionable documentation instruments make the documentation course of straightforward, saving you days, perhaps even weeks, so it’s price investigating smarter methods to tug it collectively.

Tip: Guarantee that you’ve got a solution to quickly doc your reviews and hold thisup-to-date as your reviews change. 

Ultimate phrases 

We hope these three greatest practices and suggestions will assist you in your Energy BI implementation journey. Should you haven’t already, take a look at our latest governance webinar on Self-Service BI and its Perils sponsored by Information Vizioner which outlines a spread of different greatest practices to contemplate.

Have questions or suggestions, please share them with us within the feedback part under.