You are a Finance Manager or IT Manager and the business is asking for reports. Do you open Power BI and make a start, knowing you have used Microsoft Excel and many other similar tools? Or do you take a training course? Microsoft has numerous forums and tutorials so you may well be OK. However, if you want to accelerate your learning and ensure you are following best practice from the outset it may well pay to take a day to train. Rupert Stanks, Business Development Manager at BMT Defence and Security, was faced with that conundrum and decided to talk to Shailan of Clearly Cloudy to see if he could help to bring his team up to speed, together on Power BI. They needed a training day that was flexible enough to accommodate their specific needs; covering all the basics but also tailorable to ensure they achieved specific goals. Rupert explains; “Shailan from Clearly Cloudy gave us guidance on the course content and their approach was very personable and just fitted with our culture. We talked about a week before the course, and they prepared the modules so that there were relevant examples and case studies for us to work through. It is so much more useful to run through practical examples so that there is a mix of theory and practice and real-life examples that bring it all to life.” There were a number of key benefits identified by Rupert that made the exercise extremely worthwhile; “Firstly, it brought everyone up to a required skill level. In fact, it took them beyond just a basic understanding Power BI, to be sufficiently adept that they can pass on their knowledge. It also bought everyone into line in terms of using best practice rather than adopting random/ad-hoc ways of doing things. This is particularly important as it enables the team to share workload – if one person had a unique way of doing things that was not replicable by the others this could create a bottleneck. This best-practice rigour is immensely important in any IT team. We have also enjoyed some follow-up online with Clearly Cloudy – which has been invaluable – really facilitating some individual attention where needed.” Clearly Cloudy pride themselves on their personal approach to training and the professionalism with which it is delivered. They are small enough to make it flexible and knowledgeable enough to ensure the training will hasten the learning and use of Power BI. Don’t take 5 days to try and do this on your own in a haphazard and unstructured way - learn from the best the correct way to do it, and faster. ENDS #data, #database, #SQLServer, #dataanalytics, #powerbi, #Microsoft, #Tabular, #AnalysisServices, #ReportingServices, #Azure, #BItraining, #PowerBItraining

There are a myriad of companies providing technical support, be that specialist application support or a blend of infrastructure, cloud and platform support. However, the key to matching the right service to the requirements is ensuring the skills are available to support the complete application stack as well. This can be a challenge. Only a few companies can provide depth of knowledge across the whole Microsoft stack, including Azure, SQL Server and the application suite of Dynamics. Cloud - Many companies have adopted a hybrid model whereby they have servers on their own premises as well as those on Microsoft Azure or other clouds. The Azure stack is an extension of Azure and therefore enable a consistent hybrid cloud platform which removes the hybrid complexity and enables companies to take advantage of either environment – whichever is best for the application and workload involved. The Azure stack allows connectivity and the cloud tools to be applied to the on-premise servers while allowing companies who need to comply to certain data regulations or policy requirements to upload their data to the cloud. These environments however still need to be managed and data is still at the heart of the business and ensuring its integrity is key. Database and BI – The SQL Server database and BI tools excel as the keeper of the data with a myriad of features for transactions, referential integrity, backups, mirroring and replication, but what sets SQL Server apart from competition is how well it integrates with the rest of the Microsoft stack, fundamentally most Microsoft Applications are built on SQL Server. The tools available with SQL Server may not be widely known, namely, SQL Server Integration Service, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services and now coupled with Power BI. Application – Microsoft Dynamics provides the complete business application layer that embraces every aspect of the business; operations, sales, marketing, customer and field services, project and automation, right through to analytics and business intelligence. This connected suite breaks down the silo’ d approach to data and connects operations, processes, products and customers, cutting costs and complexity and drives business information and growth. Wrapping Microsoft Dynamics into the whole Microsoft stack brings consistency of modern approach in terms of database, language and accessibility of data through natively embedded Power BI. Companies with SFDC at their core have a challenge with reporting as there remains no real BI solution from SFDC, although their purchase of Tableau recently implies that they intend to provide this. But it is not available yet as there is no genuine data warehouse facility, only tools that will give reporting of SFDC. But that is of no value if you are unable to bring in data from elsewhere such as inventory management, asset management or facilities management. At this stage the thoughts would turn to the use of a Microsoft, AWS or Google cloud platform as they are the only one with an established database solution, proven over years and at scale. Support – when it comes to support you need to be assured of the range and depth of skills across the Microsoft stack, from Dynamics and Azure to the all-important data. You need data gods who can retain data integrity and ensure you receive the reporting you need that makes sense and makes the difference to the business. Clearly Cloudy - are fundamentally data experts; data angels who provide support with Microsoft SQL server across Azure and the Dynamics application layer. They provide a support service that is an actual live person working on your environment, in your time-zone, with a real depth of knowledge of the Microsoft stack. Choosing the Microsoft stack ensures that time and money is invested into technology that will be supported and Microsoft has never become complacent but continues to innovate. The newly announced Microsoft Azure Synapse analytics is built on top of Azure SQL data warehouse to bring the power of integrating Azure ML and AI. These new solutions are tested and documented and supported by the team at Clearly Cloudy and give the security and the stability of being backed by a software giant with decades of experience in the development industry. ENDS #data, #database, #SQLServer, #dataanalytics, #powerbi, #Microsoft, #Tabular, #AnalysisServices, #ReportingServices, #Azure

You wouldn’t run your car or boiler without a service; the same applies to your data. If you were looking at your personal health, what would you expect to check (think of a well-man or well-woman health-check). Firstly, blood pressure, cholesterol, bloods, fitness, body fat and perhaps some other indications of wellbeing such as eyes, hearing and have you had a cold (on and off) for the last 4 weeks? Sounds like you – well now apply that to your data as there are multiple dimensions and many different angles you should examine to ensure your data is “healthy”. Here are just a few of the areas that need consideration. In no particular order, but the combination of checking all of these “body-parts” ensures wellness. Licensing – a license audit will examine the use of Microsoft licenses including SQL Server, Office 365 and Power BI licenses and if they can be rationalised or consolidated to increase efficiency and save money. We have frequently found customers with a vast array of virtual environments, each one spun up to support a new instance, demo or development task. This is a frequent trap, with multiple redundant or underutilised virtual servers, where the workload and provisioning are simply not aligned. An audit to map the databases, workload and capacity can frequently result in considerable savings and efficiencies. Performance – There are some useful tools that can capture performance data over a couple of weeks, which will reveal memory peaks, usage and downtime. Analysing this data can reveal where there were opportunities to consolidate into a single server. A recent acquisition by Microsoft (Movere acquired in Sept 2019) adds the power of discovery and data analytics needed to plan cloud migration as it continuously optimises and monitors server environments. Running regular scans with Movere eliminates the need to repeatedly spend time manually gathering and integrating point-in-time data from independent sources simply to understand how your IT environment has changed – Movere does that for you. It is these additional tools from Microsoft that help to eliminate duplicate data and ensure users have access to the most accurate, reliable and actionable data Reporting - BI reports are not always built on sensible information. I know shocker, but that’s the truth of the matter, as the accessibility of the data means that individuals create (or request), their own reports. These reports had meaning to them at that point in time, but now they may not make sense to the business on an on-going basis. This is where an audit report can be hugely useful. We review the report library of an organisation and look at permissions and usage of reports. Invariably the most useful information is who is NOT using what report as this unearths process issues that need amending. That was resources are focused on what is needed. Or focused on who should and who should not, be looking at that data. A proactive assessment of all reports, or health-check, involves ensuring policies are properly administered and the monitoring tools on Power BI and SQL Reporting Services provide the first step of that analysis. For reports to be meaningful in an organisation there needs to be one central point of truth; processes and policies need to be followed to so that role-based or personal workspaces reflect what they need and when (refreshed and authentic). Permissions – Creating a user profile and permissions is a key component of an audit as you need to establish who is accessing what and who is permitted to see that data and again, this needs to be checked. Part of our remit is invariably to ensure that data security is being properly heeded and that permissions have been set up to the best-practice standard. There are many considerations to this including restrictions on access, workspaces and then who can see, who can share, who can download or forward, or not. Governance – The advance in accessibility of data through the sophistication of the software tools available has created a greater governance problem. Policies, permissions, processes and security all come under “Governance” and typically this is the final document or report required to ensure compliance and to prevent problems happening again. These documents usually take the form of a mix of technical measures and process recommendations that need to be adopted. Best practice and experience – There is no “one-size-fits-all” document that sets down the rules of a data audit, but there are some broad headings that we apply from experience. These will include technical solutions but also practical advice around corporate culture, permissions policy, process governance, etc. The format we use will cover all the aspects that need to be considered from process reviews, what data sets are required for who, what reports are needed or not required, permissions and security. A data audit may start out as something as simple as checking if the data is current and result in new policies and governance that will prevent inaccuracies and ward against data loss and security issues. The tools in Microsoft including Power BI, when correctly applied, work alongside company policy to mitigate against error or mishap and provide a framework for best practice. ENDS #data, #database, #SQLServer, #dataanalytics, #powerbi, #Microsoft, #Tabular, #AnalysisServices, #ReportingServices, #Azure

Does the industry make a difference when it comes to analytics? Are the challenges the same or are they different in banking, construction and retail? According to Forrester (*), less than 0.5% of data is ever used, but just an increase in data accessibility can result in a significant improvement in profitability. And this remit sits with the Financial Controller. This role has changed significantly with the growth of “big data” or even the collecting, processing and analysis of small amounts of data. It is the accessibility of data and how that is collected and distributed that puts the FD in a truly unique position; giving visibility and insight that empowers decision making and hence why this role is more powerful than ever. FD’s are no longer just responsible for “balancing the books”, but they are instrumental and strategic when it comes to who has access to what data, how it is used and the resultant decisions that add value to the business. Data is often described as the oil of the digital economy, but what is pivotal is that oil needs refining and so does data, to unlock the true value. This ability to unlock the data is where the power and influence lies. Data analytics has 4 main pillars; 1. What happened – descriptive analytics 2. Why – diagnostic analytics 3. What could happen – predictive analysis 4. What action to take – prescriptive analysis A powerful data analytics strategy will work through all four phases in any industry or business; however, the nuances will differ by industry and experience can provide the guidance on what to look out for. Descriptive analysis mashes up raw data from multiple sources to give valuable insight from the past. For manufacturing this may be a linear analysis of operational costs and output mapped to sales. For retail this can be granular down to size, colour, style or for construction this may include weather, health and safety. But in general, the one thing that cuts across all industries is; “are we making more money than we are spending” or “are we more efficient than before” – this is the bottom line to descriptive analytics. The why (diagnostic analytics) is where industry knowledge is key as the historical data can be measured against other data to answer the question of why something happened. For instance; Why didn’t someone purchase a product or why was an order not delivered on time? Diagnostic analytics gives in-depth insights into problems. The next obvious step is what is likely to happen if…. This phase uses the findings of the descriptive and diagnostic analysis to detect clusters, trends or exceptions, and to predict future trends, which makes it a valuable tool for forecasting. Predictive can even use more sophisticated analysis such as machine or AI. This forecasting however comes with a Government Health warning however, that forecasting is an estimate and therefore the accuracy depends upon the quality and stability of the data and the situation, which is, amongst many other factors, industry dependent. The final stage (prescriptive analytics) is the purpose of the entire exercise to prescribe what action to take. This may be to avoid issues or to take advantage of trends, but it will use advanced tools and technologies and algorithms to decide which path to take. Throughout all this your data is your biggest asset and to define the right mix of data analytics for your organization, you might ask yourself the following questions: • Do your current systems give you access to the historical data? • Can you mash up data from different sources and systems into a data warehouse? • Do you have the skills internally to access the data and then slice and dice that into meaningful reports? • Do I have the right technology to extract the data? • Do the reports I have provide me with the information I need? • Could my reports be improved? Answering these questions will help you see where you are on the data and analytics journey and if you need help? The next step might be to design a roadmap towards optimising the technology and the skills you need. Then you will be able to plan the next steps to ensure you are using all four phases of data analytics that will drive the power of decision-making from the insight gained from correct use of the data. ENDS #data, #database, #SQLServer, #dataanalytics, #powerbi, #Microsoft, #Tabular, #AnalysisServices, #ReportingServices, #Azure (*) Forrester https://go.forrester.com/analytics/

1. Free, which is where we spend most of our time as consultants in the Power BI desktop 2. Pro which is a price per user per month subscription model 3. Dedicated which is a consumption model where users pay for cloud compute and storage The free tier has a lot of the core functionality for Power BI, which is available for free, particularly when you download the Power BI Desktop. So when you're a Power BI developer you're spending most of your time working with Power BI Desktop. At that point you can build a data model and pull from a huge variety of data sources. You can either publish and view online, you just can't share with other people. If you want to learn how Power BI works the free version is ideal because you can start with no financial investment, it's only when you want to use it in a corporate environment and want to share you're work that you'll have to use a paid license. With free you can setup a Power BI account, you can publish yourself and learn Power BI for a very low cost, just your own time. The next licensing model is when you need to share. It's also worth mentioning that Power BI desktop is the report authoring and creation tool. If you go to competitive products you'll generally get a time-bombed or limited tool where you'll get a couple of weeks or possibly months if they extend a trial license. The Pro version is required when you want to start sharing. We've noticed on several occasions that people will download the Power BI desktop and generate a report pack but can't give other people access. They're unsure of how to give others access so will consider sending a colleague the PBIX file which they can do but you have no controls. This is where you use Power BI Pro to create a workspace or multiple workspaces where you upload your reports to the Power BI service which is where you can start sharing the reports via one or many workspaces. Workspaces are flexible and can be structured by department or a certain group of users. As soon as you share a workspace the users are immediately notified so they can start interacting with the reports. We've noticed that other products may have licensing restrictions on how and what a user can access. The Power BI Pro license pretty much covers everything a user will need to do and you can enable/disable functionality according to user need and security. We've noticed that corporate user can see Power BI within their Office 365 environment which is provisioned but is also a free license so if they choose to use this they will need a paid license to share their work. It's worth mentioning that a Power BI license is a monthly user license that is currently $10/user/month. The main driver for people to move to Premium is pricing. The Power BI Pro license is a monthly per user named license whereas the Premium license is based on compute power that you're buying without having to give people specifically named licenses. So if you have 200-300 users who are consuming reports and not really creating reports then that's where the driver to move to Premium kicks in because it'll become cheaper to buy dedicated capacity rather then buying Pro Licenses. The other two things are features available that become unlocked with a Premium license. One of those is the ability to use Power BI embedded so if you need to provide reporting to a supplier or customer portal on your website then you'll need to use Premium, otherwise you'd need to provide named licenses for all of your suppliers or customers. The other item is paginated reporting that allows you to provide pixel perfect printable type report formats that would be otherwise unavailable in Pro. Now, it's very unlikely that the need for paginated reporting, for a small organization, will push you over the edge as the cost will probably be prohibitive for the functional benefit. There is a forthcoming feature called Power BI Premium per user license but we don’t have complete details for that yet (for more details see https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/answering-your-questions-around-the-new-power-bi-premium-per-user-license/). The announcement was made a few weeks ago where we can license Power BI Premium on a user-by-user basis. While this won't include the embedded capability it will include the paginated reporting and the increased number of model refreshes in a 24 hour period which will increase from 8 to 48. As of recording we don't have clarity of pricing. We've also seen customers upgrade their Office 365 E3 licenses to E5 as it includes the Power BI Pro license. Many customers have decided to use this option to get the Power BI licenses as they get a number of other benefits from the E5 license such as voice, conferencing and cloud app security. More details of the Office 365 E5 license are here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e5?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab. We'd advise that you work with your licensing partner to see if this is a benefit for your organization. Power BI Pro v Premium isn't an either or option. Any user that has Power BI Premium licensing will need Power BI Pro licenses for report creation and editing. But all users may consider how they can most effectively blend those licenses to get maximum cost efficiency depending on the needs of their user base. Microsoft has a useful Power BI licensing calculator here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/calculator/. Some users will also use dedicated capacity to use data center proximity to allocate Power BI compute power within a geographic proximity to their users. This can also benefit users with concerns over data protection and GDPR concerns. As a general point we try to steer users away from putting too much personally identifiable data into a Power BI model, although at times this may be unavoidable. In those cases the location of the tenant will be relevant. Machine Learning is an interesting feature that is part of Premium capacity. Right now, we don’t see users purchase Premium for this feature although it may be the case that Premium per user licenses are populate to take advantage of machine learning. We've had recent conversations where customers have asked about machine learning for subjective rather than objective data. To get more details of Power BI licensing please talk to us but also look at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ . We also recommend that you speak to your licensing partner or Microsoft sales representative to get detail and answer any specific questions.