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.
- Series Intro: Building a Data Culture
- Data Culture: Executive sponsorship
- Data Culture: A brief history of business intelligence
- Data Culture: Roles and responsibilities
- Data Culture: Picking your battles
- Data Culture: The importance of community
- Data Culture: Motivation and encouragement
- Data Culture: Training for the community
- Data Culture: Showcasing the art of the possible
- Data Culture: The importance of a central portal
- Data Culture: Making stakeholder buy-in explicit
- Data Culture: Every app is a unique snowflake
- Data Culture: Community champions with swords
- Data Culture: The importance of experts
- Data Culture: Measuring success
- Data Culture: Wisdom from Sun Tzu
- 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.
- Self-Service BI: Asleep at the wheel?
- Are you building a BI house of cards?
- Choosing the right tool for the job
- BI is dead. Long live BI!
- Fiore’s Virtues of Business Intelligence
- It all comes down to culture
- Never stop asking “stupid” questions
- The Power BI Adoption Framework – it’s Power BI AF
- Tough love in the data culture
- Data culture and the centerline
- Common sense solutions to simple problems
- Successfully measuring / measuring success
- You can’t avoid problems you can’t see
- Metadata is not a “nice to have”
- When does memory die?
- Sometimes culture is life or death
- Migrating to Power BI
- Standardizing on Power BI
- Data Governance and Self-Service Business Intelligence
- Power BI, PowerPoint, and the importance of shared goals
- Data Culture and Digital Transformation
- Rebranding Data Governance
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.
- Problem Domain, Solution Domain
- Between the problem domain and the solution domain
- Understanding the problem domain
- Simplifying the solution domain
- On joining the product team
- You are not the customer!
- Measuring success and satisfaction
- Communicating the voice of the customer
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.
BI Polar 