While Power BI brings data-driven culture to your company, you’ll only realize the true potential of this powerful tool when you transition from single usage to company-wide adoption. To ensure mass adoption and bring a cultural shift to your organization, you’ll want to first dispel common myths (and fears) surrounding Power BI adoption.
Have no fear. We’re here to debunk common myths and misconceptions with Power BI adoption so you know exactly how to overcome them.
1. There are Tried-and-True Adoption Formulas
A lot of businesses consider adoption as a definitive destination that typically involves extending the reach of Microsoft Power BI to the entire organization. While the number of regular users is definitely a metric, you’ll need to gauge the impact of BI and analytics in your organization—it doesn’t necessarily define true adoption.
The definition of adoption is rather fluidic and context-specific. For many organizations, adoption is about the total number of regular Power BI users or users in specific departments. However, for others, adoption isn’t just about how many people are using the tool, but it’s more about embracing a data-driven culture.
Naturally, this subjective approach means there are numerous ways you can achieve 100% adoption, and it will depend on how you’re planning to use Power BI. It’s important to define what adoption means to your organization and how it ties back to your organizational strategy.
For example, you may intend to just personally use the tool or to collaborate with a small team of power users to create reports and dashboards. As you realize the potential within your organization, you may want to extend the reach of Power BI to a larger team and later apply analytics across the enterprise.
As such, the context of adoption will differ in each case. Although there are defined frameworks for standard scenarios you can use to increase adoption rate, you’ll likely find yourself mixing and matching ideas from each of these frameworks to build a Power BI strategy specific to your situation.
2. Power BI Adoption Is an Achievable Goal
Many organizations believe that once they’ve built an infrastructure for successful adoption, their job is complete. You may require building some of the components once, such as setting up a logical workspace, application setup, data governance, and security best practices. The evolving nature of Power BI means you’ll have to keep every user updated about new features continuously.
Ensure your team understands what new features mean for your organization and that they receive proper training to use these features. For successful adoption, your admin should act as the Power BI product manager. Also use BI committees to set up enterprise-wide BI priorities and develop mentoring resources to execute projects effectively.
Adoption is an ongoing process that keeps evolving as you explore more opportunities with new features and apps on the Power Platform. Adoption is essentially a repeated process that involves continuous awareness, growth in understanding, and enablement.
3. IT Owns Adoption/Business Owns Adoption
One of the familiar guessing games within organizations looking to improve Power BI adoption rate is who actually owns adoption? Is it the responsibility of IT or business management? True adoption will require partnership from both sides. Executive leaders from both sides must work closely to develop an adoption framework tailored to their organization.
For IT, this partnership means ensuring the tool is secure, easy to access, and well-maintained. For business users, it’s about making sure decisions and solutions meet their requirements.
A leadership executive on the business side must also champion required process changes to support data quality needs. While IT should focus on allowing the business to remain flexible, a business must prioritize the requirements for its own data.
4. Requirements Need to Be Heavily Defined
Despite the promise of Power BI, many organizations still hesitate to integrate the tool within their processes. There is a common misconception that developing an adoption strategy demands a waterfall-like approach that defines all requirements up front.
In reality, the Power BI ecosystem is extremely flexible and lends itself to Agile methodologies. It allows organizations to build a prototype for limited processes before transitioning to an enterprise-wide integration.
As discussed earlier, you can deploy Microsoft Power BI for a wide range of scenarios ranging from personal use and smaller teams to enterprise-level collaboration and distribution. This flexibility allows you to drive adoption through both “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches.
Either you begin using the tool for personal purposes and gradually evolve to share the solution with colleagues. Or, subject matter experts in your functional departments will drive Power BI initiatives for their team.
5. 100% Adoption Means Success
It is critical to measure Power BI adoption in your organization. But even if you manage to achieve company-wide adoption, is it empowering users to access data whenever, wherever, and whichever way they want? Real success depends on what value the tool is bringing to your business, and this requires defining KPIs to track actual usage of Power BI across the enterprise.
Metrics such as how many departments or functions use BI dashboards, and even how many users access the dashboards regularly, will give you a clear picture of the adoption rate. It will also help you identify users that need assistance, as well as find BI champions that will set an example for others.
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At Skypoint CSG, we have worked with hundreds of Power BI users to help them get the most value out of the Power Platform suite. Let us know if you need help increasing Power BI adoption at your organization.
