If you’ve found this post, you have found the launch of “Livadata” – a new home for all things Power BI and more in the data world, from Megan Livadas!
I’m excited to bring my thoughts on bringing Power BI to life. If you’re reading this, you probably are quite fond of Power BI – but how do you ensure the people in your organisation are as well? What good is all your fantastic work, if your usage stats are poor, your boss still wants a “print-out” and your finance team just want their excel spreadsheet back?
I’ll be bringing content from the archives to life here soon, as well as new weekly content on all things Power BI and Fabric culture.
Why me?
I’m a self diagnosed Power BI fangirl – I have been in the data space for 7 years now, and while I’ve had a taste of many a tool, nothing quite does it in the reporting and analytics space for me like Power BI. I’m Co-Head of BI & Analytics at a fantastic boutique data consultancy – Dufrain – where I get to help so many great clients. You’ll often find me in the world of Insurance, but I’m particularly fond of retail and consumer businesses too. As a Power BI Guru, I don’t lock in to an industry specialism, so am very lucky to zip about businesses of all shapes and sizes across the UK. I’ve been leading end-to-end Power BI implementations since 2018, and since 2021 have been specialising in what I like to call Power BI enablement.
What is Power BI Enablement?
Building a dashboard is one thing, but how do you make sure people can actually use it? Power BI is often something that just “happens” to an organisation. It doesn’t always seem to receive the same considered implementations we would expect to see for other technologies. Often because organisations receive free licenses as part of their Microsoft 365 licensing, and without defining a tenant owner who really embraces the tool, Power BI can grow to become a beast of it’s own. A tool that was introduced to simplify and enrich the insight for your organisation, can end up this large and intimidating overhead that nobody quite knows where to start – if they know the overhead exists at all! I love working with organisations who are ready to regain control of their tenant. So from tenant admin, to workspace and access management, from defining roles and training plans, to launching centres of excellence, from delivering change management and version control, to implementing monitoring solutions. Not to forget, my personal favourite topic – development standards. I often become known as the Power BI police in an organisation, lifting rocks long left unturned to highlight technical debt and performance overheads that need a bit of love. All of that said, too much of a good thing… controls are great, but we must remember to balance these with innovation. I’ll come back to this topic soon, but for now, welcome! I can’t wait to get posting…
Livadata 