Building a data culture

BI Polar has a series of videos and accompanying blog posts that focus on key aspects building a data culture. This series wrapped up in November 2020, and includes 3 hours 20 minutes of content delivered over 17 videos.

  1. Series Intro: Building a Data Culture
  2. Data Culture: Executive sponsorship
  3. Data Culture: A brief history of business intelligence
  4. Data Culture: Roles and responsibilities
  5. Data Culture: Picking your battles
  6. Data Culture: The importance of community
  7. Data Culture: Motivation and encouragement
  8. Data Culture: Training for the community
  9. Data Culture: Showcasing the art of the possible
  10. Data Culture: The importance of a central portal
  11. Data Culture: Making stakeholder buy-in explicit
  12. Data Culture: Every app is a unique snowflake
  13. Data Culture: Community champions with swords
  14. Data Culture: The importance of experts
  15. Data Culture: Measuring success
  16. Data Culture: Wisdom from Sun Tzu
  17. Data Culture: Wrapping up and closing words

In December 2020 I presented a one-hour “Building a Data Culture with Power BI” session for the Glasgow Data User Group. This session is mainly a subset of what’s covered in the posts and videos above, but takes a different approach to these topics. You can find the session recording and slides here: Data Culture Presentation Resources. In the months since then I’ve delivered variations on this session for multiple user groups and conferences, so if you find other recordings online, please don’t be too surprised.

In addition to this core video series, the BI Polar blog includes a set of standalone posts that fall under the broader topic of data culture.

It’s also important to understand that a data culture is not about tools and technology – it’s about people and what people do. In this context, all of the guidance above applies not only to Power BI, but also to Microsoft Fabric as a platform.

One aspect of building a successful data culture is ongoing engagement and participation from people with solutions and people with problems. This topic is introduced in the videos and posts that focus on establishing a center of excellence and nurturing a community of practice, but there’s more to it than what’s covered here. To elaborate on this topic of problem domains and solution domains and on the importance of valuing both, I’ve also started a series of articles that look at this topic in greater depth.

If you have questions or feedback or if there’s a related topic you’d like to see me explore, please take a minute to let me know.