Podcasts about power bi desktop

This is episode 288 recorded on March 19th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric February 2025 Feature Summary, specifically the Power BI section, including a new baseline version of Power BI Desktop, Copilot changes for Power BI, a trick to get conditional formatting for Visual Calcs working, and performance improvements for Direct Lake mode. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

This is episode 286 recorded on March 12th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric January 2025 Feature Summary, specifically the Power BI section, including Storytelling updates for the PowerPoint Add-in, Semantic Model version history,  TMDL view in Power BI Desktop, and more.

Im aktuellen Power BI Quarterly sprechen Gabi und Artur viel über kürzlich stattgefundene und kommende Events, aber natürlich auch über die Features und Updates für Power BI und Microsoft Fabric der letzten Monate. Während Artur sich über vorhandene und angekündigte Updates bei Dataflows freut und die in den letzten Monaten dank DAX Query View, Developer Mode und Direct Lake Bearbeitung in Power BI Desktop stark verbesserte Entwickler-Experience lobt, gibt Gabi einen Einblick in die Gesamtstrategie mit DevOps, Copilot, Integrationen mit anderen Anbietern und Security-Funktionen. Besonders erwähnenswerte Updates waren: • der Dark Mode in Power BI • DAX Query View als Editor • Direct Lake Modelle in Power BI Desktop • Developer Mode • Semantic Link Labs • Git-Integration: bald auch für Dataflows Gen2 • Integrationen mit SAP, Databricks und Snowflake • Copyjob in Fabric, Fast Copy und Incremental Refresh • Copilot Updates • Die Entwicklung der Monitoring-Funktionen mit FUAM und einem Ausblick auf die nächsten Monate Zukünftige Events wurden auch erwähnt: • Data Platform Conference Switzerland in Zurüch am 25.10.2014 mit Vorträgen von Gabi und Artur • datamonster.io SQL-Konferenz in Hanau, diesmal wieder im Februar: 24-16.02.2025 • Level Up your Power BI am 12.-14.03.2025 in Köln • Fabcon Europe am 15.-18.09.2025 in Wien

Mike & Tommy make a Draft for the major January 2025 Power BI Desktop updates. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-january-2025-feature-summary/#post-28821-_Toc919367718 Get in touch: Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page. Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/ Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitips Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVv Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎ Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tips Follow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/ Follow Seth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-bauer/ Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mit „Expertise Unlocked", der neuen Serie im Performance Manager Podcast, möchte ich Orientierung geben. Ich mache unser Wissen und unsere Praxiserfahrung bei ATVISIO für Sie zugänglich. Ab sofort spreche ich regelmäßig mit unseren BI-Consultants über Themen, die Sie gerade bewegen. Sie erleben Klartext statt Buzzwords – damit Sie fundiert entscheiden können, welche BI-Innovationen Ihr Unternehmen wirklich voranbringen.  Diese Woche im Fokus: Power BI - Desktop Developer Mode  Erfahren Sie, wie der Desktop Developer Mode Ihre Arbeitsabläufe vereinfachen und die Zusammenarbeit verbessern kann. Diese Inhalte erwarten Sie:  Welche Vorteile bietet der Power BI-Desktop Developer Mode?  Wie können mehrere Anwender gleichzeitig an einem Power BI-Bericht arbeiten?  Was ist bei der Nutzung des Power BI-Desktop Developer Mode zu beachten?  Welche Fehler sollten vermieden werden?  Vertiefen Sie Ihr Wissen in unserer Schulung: https://www.atvisio.de/produkte/microsoft-power-bi/  

With .pbir and git intergration, along with DAX queries and modeling abilities in Desktop, when does Power BI Desktop get away from a normal pro user and into Dev hands? What do or should pros use?Get in touch: Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page. Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/ Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitips Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVv Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎ Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tips Follow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/ Follow Seth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-bauer/ Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Viel DAX, Git und Python... und vor allem: Dark Mode in Power BI Desktop - jede Menge News, die Artur und Gabi besprechen! Im aktuellen Power BI Quarterly sprechen Gabi und Artur viel über kürzlich stattgefundene und kommende Events, aber natürlich auch über die Features und Updates für Power BI und Microsoft Fabric der letzten Monate. Während Artur sich über vorhandene und angekündigte Updates bei Dataflows freut und die in den letzten Monaten dank DAX Query View, Developer Mode und Direct Lake Bearbeitung in Power BI Desktop stark verbesserte Entwickler-Experience lobt, gibt Gabi einen Einblick in die Gesamtstrategie mit DevOps, Copilot, Integrationen mit anderen Anbietern und Security-Funktionen. Besonders erwähnenswerte Updates waren: der Dark Mode in Power BI DAX Query View als Editor Direct Lake Modelle in Power BI Desktop Developer Mode Semantic Link Labs Git-Integration: bald auch für Dataflows Gen2 Integrationen mit SAP, Databricks und Snowflake Copyjob in Fabric, Fast Copy und Incremental Refresh Copilot Updates Die Entwicklung der Monitoring-Funktionen mit FUAM und einem Ausblick auf die nächsten Monate Gabi Münster begann 2005 mit SQL Server-Technologien zu arbeiten. Nach einigen kurzen Ausflügen in die Entwicklung von Webanwendungen und einer langen und inspirierenden Zeit als BI-Beraterin und Datenarchitektin bei der oh22data AG (einschließlich der Erfahrung als Data Platform MVP), kam sie im März 2022 kam sie Senior Program Manager im Fabric CAT-Team zu Microsoft. Sie spricht auf regionalen Anwendertreffen sowie nationalen und internationalen Konferenzen. Seit 2016 unterstützt sie außerdem als Co-Leiterin die regionale SQL PASS Gruppe. Neben BI-Themen liegen ihr auch Diversity-Themen sehr am Herzen.

This is episode 277 recorded on May 10th, 2024 where John & Jason talk the news in the Power BI space including Power Query support in paginated reports, Copilot Pane in Power BI Desktop & Copilot being available by default soon, and the announcement of support for reports in SharePoint & OneDrive with live connected semantic models.

This is episode 276 recorded on April 22nd, 2024 where John & Jason talk the Power BI April 2024 Feature Summary including the announcements made at FabCon in Vegas, Enhanced Q&A, Storytelling in PowerPoint, and Copilot in Power BI Desktop.

This is episode 271 recorded on December 15rd, 2023 where John & Jason talk about the Power BI December 2023 Feature Summary including a Community update, On-object Interaction updates, Extended customization for data labels, and the OneLake datahub in Power BI Desktop.

In this first of two Microsoft Build specials, the trio talk about the data related news from Microsoft Build. Covered are features like Microsoft Fabric, Copilot in Power BI, the OneLake, and the git integration with Power BI Desktop! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming off the winds of an earlier episode, just how important is it for any report author to not just get familiar with searching in Power BI Desktop, but integrating it within their normal development workflow? There is both searching the formatting pane, and for objects in the model. Is searching always worth it, or should we figure out where the heck the objects are in the first place? Get in touch: Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page. Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/ Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitips Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVv Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎ Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tips Follow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/ Follow Seth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-bauer/ Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Microsoft has released a bombshell to the entire Office 365 ecosystem: Power BI Desktop is included with the Office Installer. What implications and effects will this have on data, development, and trust? What does this mean from a governance and adoption perspective? Will this lead towards more self-service, and do we as the developers need to pivot on how we deploy and share data? Link to release: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2022wave1/power-bi/power-bi-office-installer Get in touch: Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page. Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/ Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitips Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVv Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎ Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tips Follow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/ Follow Seth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-bauer/ Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

This is episode 232 recorded July 18th, 2022 where John & Jason talk about the Microsoft Power Platform: 2022 release wave 2 plan and go over the items specific to Power BI including Query Scale-out, Dataset authoring in the Power BI Service, and Power Query Diagram view in Power BI Desktop. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

Power BI è una famiglia di strumenti di business intelligence di Microsoft. Permette a partire dai dati aziendali di generare report e quindi informazioni a supporto delle decisioni.Attraverso Power BI è possibile:-l'elaborazione dei dati e la costruzione dei report-l'analisi e la condivisione delle informazioni tra gli utentiSi definisce famiglia di strumenti perché gli elementi che compongono Power BI sono molteplici. I principali sono:Power BI Desktop, un applicazione desktop che si scarica gratuitamente sul pc, ed è lo strumento principale per l'elaborazione dei dati e la costruzione dei report.Power BI service, l'ambiente cloud dove vengono pubblicati, analizzati e condivisi i report (creati con Power BI Desktop). Si accede attraverso un account Microsoft.Power BI mobile, i report possono essere analizzati anche attraverso l'app direttamente da dispositivi mobili: smartphone e tablet.

Power BI är ett verktygen för att organisera din data. Det är en molnbaserad applikation som som du kan använda för att utforska data, dela insikter med andra och skapa anpassade bilder/grafer/diagram som är interaktiva och engagerande. Gustav Segerberg hjälper oss att förstå verktygen och pratar om hur data kan hjälpa oss till kloka beslut. Om avsnittet: Målgrupp: ekonomiavdelning, ledning, it, ledare, projektledare, kommun, region, försäljning Lär dig: Datadrivna beslut, microsoft verktyg, interaktivitet Power BI är utvecklat av Microsoft. Produkten släpptes först som Microsoft PowerPivot 2010 som ett tillägg för Excel. 2013 blev det Power BI Desktop som en fristående skrivbordsapplikation som senare döptes om till Power BI Service. Numera Power BI inom plattformen “Power Platform” Verktyget är särskilt användbart för dem som vill få affärsinsikter och skapa datadrivna beslut för att tex spåra och mäta framgång. Användare kan skapa interaktiva rapporter på vilken enhet som helst med en webbläsare eller skrivbordsapplikation/app. Det gör det lättare att dela sin analys med andra i organisationen. Några funktioner inkluderar: Visualisering: tillhandahåller diagram, grafer, kartor, mätare och annan grafikDashboards: fokuserar på att visualisera nyckeltalPivottabeller: genererar interaktiva tabeller från rådataFrågeredigerare: tillåter användare att skriva SQL-frågor Gustav Segerberg, Jonas Jaani (22:49) Länkar / mer information: Create a data-driven culture with business intelligence for all What is Power BI? Exempel på dashboard gjord i Power BI Alla avsnitt av digitaliseringens podcast Effekten: https://www.effekten.se/avsnitt Vi finns där du hittar dina övriga poddar: https://www.effekten.se/prenumerera/ Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/se/podcast/effekten-digitalisering-kunskap/id1171229363 Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZWZmZWt0ZW4uc2UvZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0Lw== Acast: https://www.acast.com/effekten Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Z49zvPOisoSwhwojtUoCm https://open.spotify.com/show/5Z49zvPOisoSwhwojtUoCm

Power Apps and other low code/no code platforms are often seen as a quick and easy solution to allow users to solve their own problems.  But is it that simple?What is the place for Power Apps, and if you decide to start a Power Apps project, how should you go about it?This week, we discuss how to approach a Power Apps project, why you should take it seriously, and why you need to think about data structures. Our main takeways this week are that Power Apps are software projects, and should be managed accordingly.  That you need think about the data, how it's stored, and how it's secured.  And you need to be mindful of what the platform does - and perhaps more importantly, what the platform doesn't do.Chris can be found here: http://www.cpegroup.co.uk You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

Documentation is often neglected in many IT projects.  This week, we talk about why it is so important, and the risks involved if you don't do it.Some of the most fundamental things you need to document are:Passwords - and do it securely in a password vaultData dictionary so everyone knows how measures and KPIs are definedConfiguration - so there is a clear understanding of where everything livesReasons behind decisions - because there might be a good reason for not doing something in the obvious wayHow you do it is up to you and your use case - it's important that it shouldn't become too onerous, and Agile is no excuse for not doing it - if all your developers leave with all your service account passwords in their heads, you're sunk.And documentation can be as simple as a OneNote notebook and comments in code, or something more complex such as a set of Confluence pages.But however you do it, make sure you ACTUALLY DO IT!!You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

Possibly a sensitive subject this week - low code development.To start with some context, we love low code development and are working on low code development projects, mainly through Power Apps. We also see the marketing of low code applications and want to put forward our experience that low code is still a software development project with all of the challenges and intricacies that come along with that.In this episode we discuss approaches to low code development and ask any involved in a low code project not to forget the disciplines of working on a software development project.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

Shelly Avery is a member of Microsoft's Healthcare Solution Acceleration Team, helping Healthcare customers digitally transform their businesses.  As you listen to this conversation you'll realize, as we did, that Shelly knows the tech AND the human side of the tech very well! References in this episode: FHIR Tom Scott - There is No Algorithm for Truth   Episode Timeline: 4:30 - The high value of customization and integrations in BI in the current era of Middleware, Microsoft Teams and how good it is at connecting humans, The speed of Innovation at MS (some of which is directly customer influenced) 32:10 -  Microsoft's FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability) is revolutionizing the rather large problem of interoperability in the Healthcare space 49:30 - Microsoft Viva is born from My Analytics, Rob gets into Headspace, using data for nefarious purposes Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guest is Shelly Avery. We've had a lot of Microsoft employees on the show and Shelley continues that tradition. The reason we have that tradition is because there are so many interesting things going on at Microsoft these days. And Shelley brought some super fascinating topics and perspectives to our conversation. For instance, she has a deep background and history with the Teams product for Microsoft. And so we got into the question of what is it that makes Teams so special? I really, really, really appreciated and enjoyed her answer. Rob Collie (00:00:31): And given her current focus on the healthcare industry and on health solutions, we talked a lot about how Microsoft's business applications and Power Platform strategy is actually a perfect fit for what's going on in healthcare today. We did touch on some familiar themes there, such as the new era of middleware, how a 99% solution to a problem is often a 0% solution to a problem. How even 100% of a solution itself is a moving target. And my only slightly partisan opinion that may be Microsoft's competitors in all of these spaces should just save themselves the trouble and tap out now. We talk about the virtual teams that exist on the Teams team at Microsoft. Sorry, I just had to work that into the intro. Rob Collie (00:01:17): I learned a new acronym, FHIR, which is the new upcoming regulatory and technological standard for data interoperability in the healthcare space. We talk a little bit about Veeva. Have you heard of Veeva? I hadn't. It's one of those technologies with a tremendous amount of potential to be used in a positive way and maybe a little bit of potential to be misused if we're not careful. And that conversation was also the excuse for our first ever sound effects here on the Raw Data Podcast. We spared no expense. An iPhone was held very close to a microphone. All in all, just a delightful conversation. I smiled the whole time. We also had the ever upbeat and awesome Krissy in the co-pilot's chair for the duration of this conversation. And with that completely unintentional rhyme out of the way, let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:04): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Rob Collie (00:02:11): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host, Rob Collie. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Welcome to the show. Shelly Avery, how are you doing this morning? Shelly Avery (00:02:35): Hey guys, doing good today. Rob Collie (00:02:37): Well, thanks so much for being here. Another brave soul, first time meeting us. You're willing to have it recorded. That's into the breach. I like it. Shelly Avery (00:02:45): It's good to meet you guys. I'm happy to talk to you today. Rob Collie (00:02:48): We brought Krissy today. Krissy Dyess (00:02:49): How's everybody doing? Rob Collie (00:02:51): How are you Krissy? I mean, it's earlier your time. Krissy Dyess (00:02:53): It is early. Yeah. So normally we do these in the afternoon, but it's early. I'm enjoying the sunrise this morning. Rob Collie (00:03:00): Oh, fantastic. Krissy Dyess (00:03:00): Doing good. Rob Collie (00:03:01): Yeah. A cup of joe, maybe. Krissy Dyess (00:03:03): I don't drink coffee. Shelly Avery (00:03:04): I've had two today. Rob Collie (00:03:05): Shelly, I actually already noticed that. I had noticed before we started recording that the color of your coffee cup changed. That, yeah, she just hot swaps the coffee. Shelly Avery (00:03:16): Travel mug to drop off the kids this morning and then real mug once I got back to the home office. Rob Collie (00:03:22): So Shelly, why don't you tell us what you're doing these days. Give us your CV. Shelly Avery (00:03:25): I am at Microsoft now. I am in a new role that Microsoft has created. I am on a team that is called the Healthcare Solution Acceleration team. And our job is to really help our healthcare customers digitally transform their businesses, hopefully using Microsoft technology. But I've been here five years. I started as a technical specialist, helping customers migrate from on-premise server base infrastructure to Office 365, Exchange and SharePoint in OneDrive. And then Microsoft Teams came around because it wasn't around. It didn't exist when I started, and I became a Microsoft Teams technical specialist. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved it. Shelly Avery (00:04:12): Teams has really empowered the world to figure out how to do work different. It created lots of opportunities for people to create new ways of solving their business problems. And it was a lot of fun to be able to partner with our customers and really help them understand how technology can be an advocate for them and just help them do things faster and more efficiently and on their own terms. And so that was super fun, especially working with healthcare. I learned through that about some other features that Microsoft had, not that I didn't know, they didn't exist, but Power Platform, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and then later Power Virtual Agents. Shelly Avery (00:05:00): And using those inside of the UI of Microsoft Teams to even further enhance what Teams does, which is communication and collaboration, but then putting apps, low-code, no-code apps, and BI and data at the fingertips of these individuals to really, really step up their game and how they're solving their business problems. It's just been super fun and I thoroughly enjoy it. And so taking all of that into my new role, specifically working with healthcare and trying to help them accelerate solutions in their organization to solve their business problems. I thoroughly enjoy what I do every day. Rob Collie (00:05:41): Do you think that your recent background in Teams was a selection criteria for going into health? It would really seem to me like that strong basis in Teams is really quite an asset for you in the healthcare specific role. Shelly Avery (00:05:55): Well, I of course would love to say yes. And I think it is for me, that's how I learned. It's a background that I feel like I'm an asset to my customers, but my new team is comprised of people from all different backgrounds. And so what our new team hopes to be is people who are deep in various different technology areas so that we can lean on each other's expertise when a solution isn't bound by Microsoft Teams. So maybe we need to create a bot in Azure and build it off of a SQL database and put it in Teams. And so we're crossing the entire Microsoft stack. And so, yes, I'm deep in Office 365 and Teams and getting much better into the Power Platform, but as soon as I need to build a bot in Azure, I'm like, "What, how do I do that?" Shelly Avery (00:06:59): So I need that other person on my team who is deep in that area. We're here with you guys. I know y'all are deep in Power BI. We have data scientists on our team and experts in Power BI, which I am not that, but I leverage them because when I talk to my customers, they want to create dashboards and reports that they can have actionable insights on. And so I understand the use case or the problem they're trying to solve. And then I work with my data scientists on the team to help. We come together and bring our skills together to help the customer. So it's just a super fun team. We all geek out in our own area. Rob Collie (00:07:38): Yeah. I mean, it is really a perfect little microcosm of what Microsoft is trying to do with the Power Platform in general. Isn't it? Years ago when they renamed, they Microsoft renamed the Data Insights Summit to be the Business Applications Summit, it wasn't really clear what was going on. There just seemed like one of those funky Microsoft renames. You know how Microsoft changes the acronyms for all you folks in the field, every 18 months, just for yucks. It seemed like one of those, but no, that wasn't it at all, right? There actually was a really long-term grand plan that was already clear behind the scenes there, that just wasn't really clear on the outside. Rob Collie (00:08:18): And all of these technologies coming together, the low-code, no-code or rapid development, whatever you want to call it, right? All of these tools, they enable something to come to life that every single environment, every single customer is different and their needs are different. Their fundamental technological systems that they use, all their mind of business applications, all of those are different and unique. They're unique mix. Plus then you add in the unique challenges that are going on in their particular environment. Rob Collie (00:08:45): You want something off the shelf, but at the same time, if it's not incredibly flexible, if it's not incredibly customizable, it's never ever, ever going to meet the needs of that reality. And I think Microsoft has one of the strongest long-term bets I've ever seen Microsoft make. And it's been really interesting to see it come into focus over the years. Shelly Avery (00:09:06): I'm glad you see that and a lot of people do, but we have a lot of customers. I keep saying health because that's who I work with, that there are health care pointed solutions that are out there that have a single purpose and they are off the shelf. And they do usually do a great job at what they do, but they only do one thing. And we find that almost every application or SaaS that they subscribe to or purchase, has to be connected to data or systems or things like that. And then they have 50 different apps all connected to 50 different things, and it becomes complex. And you have service contracts and everything has to be managed. And so we are pushing that we have a turnkey solution. Shelly Avery (00:09:54): We're actually saying the opposite. We have a solution that gets you 80, 85% of the way there, but then that last bit is fully customizable to make it exactly like you want. And so sometimes that's hard to tell a customer that, "Hey, you're going to pay for something and then you have to build it," or, "You have to pay someone else to help you build it." And they have to be able to see the benefit of that to keep costs down and reduce complexity and app sprawl is something that we see a lot. And so being able to streamline that is something that we definitely try to do and help our customers understand the benefit of. Rob Collie (00:10:33): Sometimes 99% rounds to zero. You have a 99% solution to something, but you simply cannot do the last 1%. And a lot of cases, that's just a failure. I think a lot of off the shelf software, even if it got to 99% of what you need, which is a phenomenal number, it's still not doing it. Plus we also got to remember that the 100% target is also not static. Things change. Even if you're 100% today, your needs tomorrow are going to be different. The ability to customize, the ability to create new integrations and new applications, even if they're lightweight within your environment, is an ongoing must. Rob Collie (00:11:16): I think approaching this as a platform while at the same time making that platform very humane, it doesn't require me to sit down and write C-Sharp every single time I need something new, that's just amazing. I think if you zoom back on all of this, it's almost obvious once you know what to look for. All of the individual systems that we buy, and this is even true of our business here at P3. We're, "Best of breed," in terms of all the line of business software that we've adopted. Best of breed, AKA, whatever we stumbled into at that particular point in time. All those little silos, those line of business silos are very competent. Maybe not excellent all the time, but they're very competent at what that silo is supposed to do. Rob Collie (00:11:59): But an overall business environment, an overall team environment doesn't stop at those silos. It's like the whole thing. It's the whole picture. It's the whole organic total across all of those silos. That's where you live. You don't live in one of them. And so integration across them of various flavors. I think we're in this new second or third era of middleware right now. And Microsoft is just so, so, so well positioned in this game. I didn't see this coming. I just woke up one day and went, "Oh, oh my gosh. Look at what my old buddies are up to." Checkmate. It's been really cool to watch. Shelly Avery (00:12:40): Yeah. It's been really awesome to be here and live it. Sometimes when you're in it, you don't see it happening. And then you look back and you say, "Wow, we've come a long way in the last three years or five years." Rob Collie (00:12:52): Yeah. Let's talk about Teams a little bit more before we switch back into health. Shelly Avery (00:12:57): Yeah, sure. Rob Collie (00:12:57): I find the Teams phenomenon to be just fascinating, which is another way of saying that I missed it a little way, right? Back when I worked on the Excel team, every few years whenever office would finish a release, there'd be like this open season of recruiting. People could move around within office, like a passport free zone. You could just go wherever you wanted. I always struggled to get people who had never worked on Excel to come work on Excel. It was scary. Rob Collie (00:13:24): They've been working on things like Outlook or Word or something like that. It's easy to be, "An expert user of Outlook." It's easy to be an expert user of Word. In other words, the difference between the 80th percentile user of those apps and the 99th percentile user of those apps, it's hard to even distinguish. You can't even really tell the difference between them and practical usage. That's not true for Excel though, right? Shelly Avery (00:13:44): Right. Rob Collie (00:13:45): An Excel expert is like a magician compared to an amateur. And so that was really intimidating, I think. That was the fundamental reason why people struggled to take the leap to come to the Excel team. They felt more comfortable where they were, but a pitch I always gave, which were about a 20% success rate, was data fits through a computer really well. A CPU can improve data. It's built for that. Whereas Outlook and Word, even PowerPoint, I've revised my opinion on all of these since then, but this is me in my early 30s. Going, all those other things, those are about ideas, and communication, and collaboration. Rob Collie (00:14:25): And that's all human stuff. And human stuff doesn't really fit through a CPU all that well. It doesn't come out the other side, enriched in the same way that data does it. Hubris in hindsight, right? I said, "There's never an end to how the improvement that can happen in Excel." Whereas something like Outlook or Word, might be essentially nearing its end state. Then comes Teams, right? Teams is the kryptonite to that whole pitch. I hear myself back in the early 2000s, Teams is all about human interaction. I guess that's what it does. Rob Collie (00:15:02): I guess, to me, it's this alien form, Teams has just exploded. People love it. It's everywhere. I mean, this is an impossible question to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because it's fun to do. What is it? Why are people so excited about Teams? For a while there, it's like SharePoint held a fraction of this excitement. It's in a similar spot, the hub for collaboration in the Microsoft ecosystem. It feels like Teams has said, "Here, let me show you what that really looks like." Shelly Avery (00:15:36): Yeah. I'll do my best to try, but this is my opinion. I don't know what anybody else thinks, but I think it takes the best of the consumer world and the best of the enterprise or commercial world and puts it together all in one app. It has things that when you chat with somebody, it's like you're using a text message. So it's no different than, if you're an Apple user, you open your phone and you go to the green text message app or you go to the Teams app and it looks exactly the same. It has gifts and it has reactions, and you can put stickers and memes in there. And so it's super fun. Shelly Avery (00:16:19): But then you take that enterprise and you can also share a OneDrive link or create a meeting or send someone an Outlook invite or whatever. So it takes that enterprise and mushes it with consumerism. And so it's like taking Facebook and LinkedIn and Office and SharePoint and smashing it all into one app. And so you can have fun with it. You can build relationships with your colleagues or even people external to your organization, but then you can also build presentations and dashboards and create, and even use the Power Platform from a low-code dev perspective, right inside of Teams. Shelly Avery (00:17:02): It spans the spectrum of fun to developing brand new stuff. And so everybody can get something out of it and they can use it the way they want to use it for the purpose that they need to work on, whatever they're doing for the day. And so it can be great for various different people in various different ways. Rob Collie (00:17:28): I love that answer. Krissy Dyess (00:17:29): I have a different perspective. I came from a background of data and technical and all of that type of thing, but this Teams, really with everything transitioning to remote in a hurry over the last year, I feel like it really helps with a level of organization and communication and assets that you talked about, Shelly, to centralize all that because in a difference of data coming at you from many places, now we have communications, now we have remote teams. Krissy Dyess (00:18:05): And I love, like you said, it is fun, it's interactive. Here's where I'm struggling a little bit with Teams. I love it, but what is proper Teams etiquette in terms of like meetings and conversations? For example, I'm having a meeting and I don't want to interrupt somebody, so I'm going to put it in the chat. But then sometimes people feel like, well, the chat is still a form of interruption. I see it as a form of participation. And so I think people are still learning how to embrace these tools. Shelly Avery (00:18:38): Yeah. Well, I think that it also comes to culture. Krissy Dyess (00:18:41): Sure. Shelly Avery (00:18:41): And Microsoft has an amazing culture. We have been on a journey through Satya, our CEO, on really changing the culture of inclusivity and a growth mindset. And it's interesting when we interact with customers who don't have a very friendly and open culture. But I think you use it the way it works for you and for the people that you're working with and your culture. So if you're in a small team setting and it's friendly people, you should feel comfortable to use it the way that it makes you feel comfortable. Shelly Avery (00:19:23): But if you're in a quarterly business review with executives, I mean, think about it. If you're going to lunch with your buddies, you're going to act different than if you're going to a formal dinner with executives, right? And so you use the technology in a way that you would use real life. And so if I'm going to lunch with my buddies, I'm going to be cutting up and giving them funny gifts and patting them on the back. And if I'm in a business meeting with executives, I'm going to have my best dress on and my polite manners. So I'm going to act that way in a meeting too. Krissy Dyess (00:19:51): I totally agree with you. I've had the opportunity recently to work with the Microsoft team and I agree there's a completely different culture than what we see, even from my background, even from our culture, I mean, we're all friendly and stuff. Every organization does have their own culture and exactly what you pointed out, even within that organization, there are different levels and cadences. Shelly Avery (00:20:13): Yeah, it's crazy. So I spent the last three years helping IT organizations deploy Microsoft Teams. And I did that in the midst of COVID, in healthcare. So when you say remote work overnight, literally help telecare organizations enable 35,000 individuals for Teams over a weekend. To the question about culture, it was very difficult for some of the IT organizations to say, "Well, what should we allow our users to do?" There's sensitivity that you can set on gifts in a team. You can say, do we want them to be explicit or PG-13 or PG or G? Shelly Avery (00:20:58): And I had one organization that if there was anything to do with a gift that had to do with politics, that was seen offensive, because what if I sent you a Trump gift and you were a Biden person. I mean, how dare you do that? And so that company was very, very sensitive and they would only allow gifts at a G rating. And a G rating were like cartoons and stickers, where other organizations are like, whatever. If you don't like it, don't use it. Shelly Avery (00:21:29): So there's definitely different cultures and different organizations across the country. And so luckily, there are the controls in the back end and the administrative section on those kinds of things. And then for data too, do you want data to be shared externally or do you want people to be able to chat externally or not? And who do they want to be able to chat with? So there's lots of governance and data protection controls in the background. Krissy Dyess (00:21:58): And being a data person, what is really cool about Teams and all these things that you just described is on the backend, all of that stuff is just data. That's why you can control. That's why you can help your organization with these. And I think that's really cool. I am super excited about Teams. I was excited about Power Pivot in Excel, and I was excited with Power BI Desktop, and what you explained too, how it starts to integrate the Power Apps, the bots, all of that into this changing ecosystem of how we work, the ability to bring that from the top level all the way down to the frontline workers, to impact and drive actions, I am super excited about Teams. I can't wait to see how organizations learn more, how that they can adopt these tools, because I think there's so much that people just don't know because it is so new and it's a different way, just like Power BI was. Shelly Avery (00:22:57): I'll give you an example about that. We have this one group inside of Microsoft, it's called the [SLATE 00:23:04] team. And you know how Microsoft is with making acronyms. I have no idea what SLATE actually stands for, but what they do is they work with customers who have a unique idea and they help them build low-code or apps inside a Teams. And they built this one app called the Company Communicator. Basically what it is, is it's like a mass texting app, where I can create a little message and push it out via chat or via a Team to everyone in the organization or to a subset of people. Shelly Avery (00:23:39): And it created a cute little adaptive card where you could put a headline and a picture, and then a little message. After that got so popular, Microsoft built it into the product, right? It started from a customer, it went through a program. It was customer purpose built. Then it got so much organic growth through all of our customers loving this idea of pushing notifications. So we turned it into code and now it's in the product. I think that, that is so cool, how Teams is democratizing the ability for customers to influence product and future releases that now everybody in the world gets to take advantage of. Shelly Avery (00:24:28): So that's another thing that I just, I love about it as a product, but also we call it the Teams team at Microsoft, is they're innovating so fast and I'm just a few months out of that role and I already feel behind. I just saw a blog with what's new in Teams in August. And I'm like, I need to go and read this to make sure I know everything that's new because they just come out with so much new stuff every month. And it closes the gap, Rob, you mentioned earlier, when a product's only 99%, it's really zero. Shelly Avery (00:25:03): I think the bet on Microsoft is, it might be 99% today, but it's probably going to be 100% in a couple of months because we're innovating so fast. And your 99% today, isn't going to be your 99% in six months. And so it's a moving target, not only for the customer, but for Microsoft too. And so we want to catch up with features that are on the backlog, but the backlog just keeps growing and growing. And so the faster we can innovate and build these into the product, we will. Rob Collie (00:25:33): I just feel like if you're watching a really high stakes chess match, which I never do, but imagine that you did, to the untrained eye, this is an even game. And all of a sudden, one of the chess masters just resigned, just tips the king over and says, "Yeah, I've lost." I just feel like as a software industry, we should just take a moment and say, "Hey, Salesforce, all your other, your SAP, do y'all just want to call it, you want to just tip your Kings over, save us all a lot of trouble." I don't even work for Microsoft and I'm looking at this going, "Oh, boy." Remember, I'm not paid to say this. I really think Microsoft has really, really, really dialed it in. Rob Collie (00:26:16): I'd like to also go back to your answer about why Teams is so special. I think it was a perfect answer. Rewind 10 years, 11 years, I'm struggling to explain to people why this whole DAX and tabular data modeling thing that was only present at that time, only in the Excel environment, and only as an add in, it was, in some ways the most primitive exposure possible of this new technology. I was trying to explain to people why this was so special. And it was particularly difficult to explain it to people who had intimately known it's [4Runner 00:26:49], which was the analysis services multi-dimensional. Rob Collie (00:26:52): And really, technologically speaking, there wasn't too much about this new thing that was superior. If you looked that gift horse in the mouth and examined its lines and everything, you'd be like, there's really not much different here or it's clearly better. Now it had one thing that was clearly better, which was the in-memory column oriented compression. And that was pretty sci-fi. That was pretty cool, but it wasn't the tech. It wasn't like one of these was able to make the CPU scream at 500% capacity or something like that. It wasn't that at all. It was that this new tech fit the way humans work so perfectly. It met the humans where they were, whereas the previous one forced the human world to bend to its will. The humans had to come to it and meet it where it was. And this is a very subtle and nuanced point. Rob Collie (00:27:49): But in practice, it is everything. In practice, it means that a company like ours, that operates completely differently than the data consulting firms and BI professional services firms of the past, and really honestly, today, I think most firms are still operating that old way. We're a completely different species of a company. And we exist because these tools work a different way for the humans. And over and over and over again, this is why the ROI from Power BI is so insane when you use it the right way, when you really lean into it strikes. Your explanation about Teams, it echoed that for me. It's professional tool that fits the humans really well. Rob Collie (00:28:36): And you don't typically talk about stuff like that. If you're a technology professional, those kinds of answers, you're always looking for some sort of more hardcore answer. It's capabilities. Look at the check boxes it's got on the box, right? This other description of it fits the humans really well, it's not a good sales pitch, but in reality, it's everything. It's a difficult thing to do, right? Rob Collie (00:28:59): One of its chief strengths is also just, doesn't make a good sound bite or like, oh, okay. So now you have to wait and see it for yourself. You have to experience it. And I think that's what we've seen. Is that the people who've really leaned into Teams, they all have this surprised reaction, or they say, six to 12 months after really getting into it, as they describe how much they like it, there's this undertone of, "Yeah, it's really turned out to be amazing." You can tell that they didn't quite expect it. And now they're a convert. Shelly Avery (00:29:31): Well, I think a lot of IT organizations, they push applications out and Teams to the masses is, oh, it's just another application that IT is forcing us to use. And they're resistant to change because the last app IT pushed out wasn't great. And then they finally get in there and they do what you and I are talking about. They chat in it, they text in it, they meet in it, they have fun in it. And then six months later, they're like, "How did I do my job without this?" They enjoy it. It's easy to use, it's very accommodating and friendly to different personalities and different work types. And it's so unique in the way that you and I and Krissy can all use it all day long, every day, and we use it completely differently, and yet we all have the same opinion of it, is it works great for me. Rob Collie (00:30:30): That's the whole mark of a successful product. And one that spreads itself, right? It develops impassioned evangelists. Again, just like everyone else, I would not have seen that coming. Shelly Avery (00:30:41): You were at Microsoft from an Excel Power Pivot perspective and you now are not, and have started your own business and they're successful in that. I know people that worked at Microsoft and literally quit Microsoft just to be a YouTube star on how awesome Teams is and all the cool stuff you can do with it, and they've made a living out of it because it's a product that does so much and it's never ending in the way that it can be used and how unique it is. It blows me away when I actually saw a gentleman who was at Microsoft as a product manager and I followed him on YouTube, and then one day he said, his YouTube post was, "I am retiring from Microsoft." And he was younger than I am. I'm like, "How are you mean you're retiring?" Krissy Dyess (00:31:32): I followed the same story that you did, Shelly. I know exactly who you're talking about. What I really love, what the appeal of it to me is, is it's always these little things that people don't know that make the biggest impact. And when you're in an environment where you're not exposed to people doing those neat tips and tricks, having the ability of finding somebody out onto YouTube sharing that, and then you can bring it into your organization and start to spread it, it's really impactful because a lot of times people think, "Oh, it needs to be this complicated technical solution." And honestly, it's always the little things that people are like, "Wow, I didn't know I could do that." Shelly Avery (00:32:12): Agreed. Rob Collie (00:32:13): So let's turn the corner. Let's talk about health, Shelly. Where should we start? Shelly Avery (00:32:16): Well, when you were talking earlier about how Microsoft Teams is this new thing, I think people had an aha moment and I think there is an aha moment that is about to come in health. And I'd love to talk about that for a minute. I think it plays into your audience well because it's about data. Rob Collie (00:32:41): Very important question. Are there people involved? Shelly Avery (00:32:43): There are people involved. Rob Collie (00:32:45): Oh, okay then. We're good. We're good. Shelly Avery (00:32:46): Yeah, yeah. Rob Collie (00:32:47): Okay. All right. Shelly Avery (00:32:48): Yeah. There is interoperability of data in health. So think about, from a human perspective, heaven forbid you get in a car accident and you go to an ER and they have to bandage you up. That ER is owned by some health organization and they now have data on you, but it's not the same health organization where you go to see your primary care physician. And so how does your primary care physician know about your ER visit and how do they know what medicines that you were given and whether those had adverse reactions to you or not? Shelly Avery (00:33:22): Well, without interoperability of data, that just doesn't happen. And there is an old version of healthcare interoperability called HL7. Again, another acronym, but the new interoperability standard is called FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability. The idea of FHIR is supposed to be universal so that that ER can digitally transfer that information to your PCP, your primary care physician. And so your medical record and your information can stay up-to-date with all the people that are medically treating you or for even you, like if you move to another city and you want to say, "Hey, I need all my information. I'm going to take it to my new doctor." Shelly Avery (00:34:10): And so this idea of interoperability, it's not a Microsoft thing. It's a healthcare standard that is happening in the industry. But what Microsoft has done is we have gone full steam ahead on this FHIR interoperability and built a stack of technology solutions based on ingesting data through FHIR. And we have a bunch of healthcare APIs, FHIR API being one of them, to now take all those low-code, Power Platform, Microsoft Teams, bots, and hydrate those apps with all of this data from healthcare to now be able to really unleash this data. Shelly Avery (00:35:02): So you need an app to have a rounding solution bedside in a hospital. You now have the ability to suck that data in from Rob, that he's been to the ER and his primary care physician, and now you're in for knee surgery. And so I have all that information that's aggregated from all over, and now it's in this cute little rounding app that we built off of Power Platform, or same thing with Power BI, or a chat bot in Teams. We can chat this health data and say, "Hey, is Rob's labs ready yet?" And the chat bot goes and sucks that data in and says, "Yes, here's Rob's labs. Here's the link to it." Shelly Avery (00:35:44): And so just being able to unleash that and build these apps or bots or experiences for the human to be able to interact with that data is really what we are trying to do. And so I'm super excited about it. This is a new team that I'm on and this is really what we're trying to drive. So I think it's going to be game changer for the industry. Rob Collie (00:36:09): So this is my first time hearing of this new interoperability standard. First of all, FHIR, it sounds cool. I like it. It definitely sounds like it's useful for sharing healthcare and patient information across organizations. Do you also see it as something that's going to be useful even within an organization, like between the silos, between these different systems within a single entity? Shelly Avery (00:36:32): Yes. And it will do that first before it goes across organizations. And- Rob Collie (00:36:37): Okay. Shelly Avery (00:36:38): This is a challenge internally too, because there's software technology that these electronic medical records, that your medical record, my medical records sit in at each of these organizations. And most large healthcare providers have multiple instances of these electronic medical records. Sometimes they have multiple different types through mergers and acquisitions and growth over time, or this department got an upgrade, but the other department didn't. And even amongst themselves, they can't share information with each other. And so if a call center services 10,000 patients, but they have four different electronic medical records, when Rob calls into that call center, how the heck do I know which one you're in and who you are and all that? Shelly Avery (00:37:30): So if we can use this FHIR interoperability to aggregate all of that and have it in a single place, now we've built this great call center app that knows that Rob is calling in and who you are. And I immediately have your information. I could say, "Oh, Rob, are you calling about the meds that you got from your ER visit last week?" It's very personalized. So let's personalize care. Let's have better patient engagement. Let's round with our patients and have the right information where we need it, regardless of where the original data sits. Rob Collie (00:38:01): So it's a new standard, FHIR, right? Shelly Avery (00:38:04): Yes. Rob Collie (00:38:04): And so let's pretend I'm a healthcare organization and I have, again, these, "I've got a best of breed set up." I've got a jillion different siloed line of business systems. Some of them are new, some of them are not. These older systems that I have, they're not going to be playing nice with this new FHIR standard. They haven't even heard of it, that software. So- Shelly Avery (00:38:24): That's correct. Rob Collie (00:38:25): How do I, as an organization, connect those wires when some of my more long-ended two systems aren't going to be supporting the standard natively? Shelly Avery (00:38:36): And that's part of our challenge right now. A lot of the customers that we're talking to, they see the future, they like the vision that Microsoft is painting. They want these human interactions like we're discussing, but they'll say to us, "We aren't ready for FHIR," or, "We haven't made that transition yet." Our comment back to them is we can help you get there. And it is a requirement that they get there by a certain date in the future. So why not have a company like Microsoft help them? Shelly Avery (00:39:11): Now, it's not necessarily an easy task. There are data mappings that have to happen. And a lot of these electronic medical systems are in the old standard, which we can map from the old standard to the new standard. It takes a little bit of manual work, but you only have to do it once, because once you do it once, it's in the standard and now you've unleashed that data. There's also custom fields though. Some developers- Rob Collie (00:39:38): Of course. Shelly Avery (00:39:38): Have gone into these electronic medical records and they built some custom field that doesn't map to FHIR. So then you got to have somebody who knows that. And so there is hard work to do it in the beginning. I'm not trying to say that there isn't, but we do have healthcare interoperability partners, and system integrators, and Microsoft to help these organizations get into that standard. And the new marketed term for all of this is the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Shelly Avery (00:40:10): And so it's all about ingesting that data and then unleashing that data to create these great, either apps or applets, or bots, or scenarios that empower the people who either work at these systems or even for patients to be able to interact with and have better experiences for themselves. And so, you only have to do the hard work once and then it's in there. And so you're right. It isn't a turnkey, there is work that has to be done, but they're going to have to do it eventually. So we'd love to be able to partner with them and help them get to meet those regulatory compliances that are coming in the near future. Rob Collie (00:40:52): Yeah. Another example of where it's good to have a platform, right? Shelly Avery (00:40:55): Right. Rob Collie (00:40:56): If that missing 1% is interoperability, that's a big 1% that a platform like Microsoft is very, very, very prepared to help you connect those dots. It also, it's really helpful that these older systems that we're talking about, if they already had to, as you pointed out, if they already had to play ball with an older interoperability format, that's end sharp contrast to your average line of business software that has no interest in interoperability at all. T Rob Collie (00:41:26): he average line of business system is like, no, no, no, no, no. We are a silo and we like being a silo. And why would we ... Mm-mm (negative), no. We are here to hoard the valuable data that is collected in here. Mm-mm (negative), no. Even though it sounds rightfully like labor intensive, one time investment, compared to the average interoperability game that happens across the world, across all industries, it sounds like there's already a really, really, really strong starting point. That's a big, big, big point in your favor. Plus if it's going to be a regulatory standard in the future, that is unheard either. Shelly Avery (00:42:00): Right. Krissy Dyess (00:42:01): I'm curious though, as to what changed, because honestly, it is one of the reasons why I'm appointment averse, is because every time you go into a different doctor and it's really common for people to move nowadays. And you're like, oh, I got to fill out all the same forms, over and over again. In my mind, I always thought it's somewhere. Why can't it be everywhere? I guess I thought maybe there was some privacy reason that was the blocker. Has something changed there? Shelly Avery (00:42:28): You're absolutely right. And no, there is still what's called the HIPAA regulations. And so the entire Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is HIPAA compliant. It does meet all of the requirements for that. And so the FHIR standard, FHIR mandate is under that HIPAA compliance. And so that's a U.S. regulation. It's not in the EU or others. They have their alternative to HIPAA around keeping healthcare information protected. And it's important to be able to do that. And so the old HL7 standard of interoperability was highly customizable and the new FHIR standard is less customizable, and that is how it is able to have more liquid interoperability. Shelly Avery (00:43:27): I'll give you an example. Sex and gender are two completely different things. And we know that in this day and age, but in the FHIR standard, there is a born sex and it is one or another, and you can't really change it. But in the HL7, you could add seven or eight or nine or 10 different categories for that. So when you have the FHIR standards met, born sex is a one or a zero, basically. Right now they have the other category of gender that there's a bunch of options there. And then they even have another category. And so it's creating the standard that everyone in healthcare has to meet as opposed to going in and making it where I can make 37 customizations because in my hospital, I allow them to have 37 choices. Shelly Avery (00:44:28): Religion is another one. Religion is huge. I mean, there's endless amounts of religions. In the FHIR standard, there's a set amount and then in other. And so you have to fall into either the set amount or other, and that allows for that more liquid interoperability, or that is the goal. That's the goal of FHIR. Now, I'm getting a little deeper into more of the regulatory compliance and how the standards work. There's tons more deep technical experts on healthcare compliance than I am. I'm more of a technologist than a healthcare compliance expert, but knowing how it works a little bit helps you understand why the technology is empowering or we hope in the future has the potential to empower the industry to be able to do more with this data. Rob Collie (00:45:18): Even that little deep dive there, I mean, that really, for me and for the listeners, you really just certified your bonafides there. If anyone was wondering how deep you were into this stuff. You always got to be careful. You're not the expert on that. There are people who know it much better than you. The fact that you know that much while also being on top about all those other stuff, you're in the right role. Like Holy cow. Shelly Avery (00:45:41): For my role, they did require healthcare expertise. And we have another team that partners with us that actually are folks from the industry. So we have MDs, PhDs, ex-CIOs and nurses with their RNs, from industry that work at Microsoft as the healthcare industry team, that partner with us around more of these deep healthcare needs. And when we're talking to chief medical officers or chief nursing officers, who doesn't like their title to be matched. Shelly Avery (00:46:18): So when we have a chief medical officer like Dr. Rhew at Microsoft, or a chief nursing officer, or ex-CIOs of healthcare organizations to come in and talk to current CIOs, they feel like we're talking to them from their shoes. And so my team partners with that industry team. Not that they aren't technical and don't understand how the technology works, but we are supposed to understand healthcare enough and how the technology fits for those healthcare scenarios and use cases that they need help with. Rob Collie (00:46:52): To use a metaphor, if you're going to build re race cars, it helps to hire some people who drive race cars. Shelly Avery (00:47:00): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:47:00): Right. I've seen this evolution on the Excel team over the years too. There's more and more people on the Excel team who came up not originally as software engineers, but as people in finance and things like that. Whereas I was a computer science major that had to learn Excel in order to work on the Excel team. And so it was, if you populate a team with nothing but me, back then anyway, you end up with a team of mechanics who has no idea what it's like to go into turn three cars ride. I'm using a racing metaphor. I don't even watch racing. I find it incredibly dull, but I love a good metaphor though. Shelly Avery (00:47:40): Sure. Absolutely. I think Microsoft has done that and is continuing to expand that industry team, even our president of health and life sciences comes from the industry. A lot of our leaders from even a marketing perspective or from a product development perspective, they're starting to hire from the industry. Rob Collie (00:48:03): That's wisdom. That's humility. I think 20 years ago, we would've probably seen Microsoft put some up and coming computer science guard in that role. And you still need those people for sure. Someone who grew writing C++ isn't going to know everything that they need to know. It's again, there's this whole notion of collaboration. The thing we keep coming back to. It takes a lifetime to amass the expertise to be truly good at something. Rob Collie (00:48:29): And so, guess what, you're never going to find everything that you need in one person. You're going to need people with different histories in order to be successful. And so it's simple. And yet I don't take it for granted, when I see teams being assembled this way, I've learned to respect it, that it is a necessary and good thing. It's always worth praising even if it seems like it's table stakes. A lot of people don't view it as table stakes. Still, they've got some things to learn. Krissy Dyess (00:48:55): So Teams is empowering, it's a central hub, it's a window into all these other applications, the Power BI that brings the insights, the bots, the Power Apps, the drives actions. Tell me a little bit about the Veeva. I hear about Veeva, that whole human side. Tell me how you're seeing Veeva start to make its way to help balance, I think. Rob Collie (00:49:21): And what is Veeva? Krissy Dyess (00:49:21): Yes. Veeva. Shelly Avery (00:49:23): Yeah, sure. Microsoft Veeva is what we have marketed the name of our employee experience platform. If you're a Microsoft E, you've probably seen in the past years something in Outlook called MyAnalytics. MyAnalytics was the very early stages of what is now Microsoft Veeva. MyAnalytics was a analytics engine that had some AI in it that would give you insights about your day, or your week, or your month. It would tell you, "Hey, Shelly, you were meeting with Krissy like every week for a few weeks and you haven't talked to her in a while. Do you think it's about time to reach out?" And then it will even give you a button that says, chat with Krissy now, or schedule a meeting with Krissy now. Krissy Dyess (00:50:18): And I love that. Shelly Avery (00:50:19): Yeah. It would pop open your calendar- Krissy Dyess (00:50:21): Because I would forget. You have all your lists and you have all your things. And honestly, when those things would come across, I was like, "Oh, yeah, you're right." And I was like, wait a minute. The technology is getting on top of all this stuff that I can't keep track of. It's amazing. Shelly Avery (00:50:34): Yeah. That was the beginning of it. Microsoft also came out with another tool called Workplace Analytics, which was the next step of MyAnalytics, where it would anonymize the data and send it to your manager or to your direct report and it would go up the chain all the way. So if my manager had 10 people on it, he would get a daily or weekly report that said, "Hey, your 10 people, this is what they're doing. They're multitasking in their meetings or they're working after hours. Hey, maybe you should encourage them to close the lid of their laptop at night. Let them have better work-life balance." It provides the manager with insights. Right? Krissy Dyess (00:51:17): That's right. Because these are important. This is important to your overall health of your business, your company, your culture. Shelly Avery (00:51:24): Exactly. So Microsoft Veeva took MyAnalytics and turned it into what is now called Veeva Insights. And then there is Manager Insights and Workplace Insights. And so insights is really just a rebranding and a movement from MyAnalytics in Outlook. And it's now insight of Microsoft Teams. Because Teams has that developer side of it, there's so much more that you can do with that information in Teams than it is within Outlook. And so it gives you nudges also to set focus time on your calendar or set learning time on your calendar, and it updates your status, your green, yellow, red, to focusing or away or things like that. And so it uses AI to help you know maybe when you're overworking or who you might need to collaborate with. Recently, Microsoft made a investment with a meditation company, Headspace. Krissy Dyess (00:52:30): Yes. Yes. See, this speaks to me. I love it. Shelly Avery (00:52:33): Yeah. It's built into Microsoft Veeva. What I use it for is there's a feature called your Virtual Commute. We all used to drive in and drive out of the office and you had, and I forgot about it, but you had that me time in the car. We could listen to a podcast or veg out on the radio or something, but it was some me time while you were in the car, going home from work. And we lost that when we all went remote. It's like I literally shut my computer and then I walk in the kitchen and start cooking dinner. It's like, where is that me time? And so I use the Virtual Commute and I don't use it every day. It's about a five to seven minute decompression. It says, are you ready to wrap up your day? Krissy Dyess (00:53:17): I need this. Shelly Avery (00:53:17): Do you have any last minute emails you need to send? Do you need to create any to-dos? And it integrates with Microsoft to-dos, so you can click on things and say, add to my to-do. And then it walks you through a little meditation. Yeah, Rob's got it on right now. Krissy Dyess (00:53:38): This feels amazing. You just took this conversation to a new place and adding in the music. I'm feeling it. This is just taking work to a new level. Rob Collie (00:53:50): Imagine a world of Raw Data. Data with the human element. Krissy Dyess (00:53:58): No, no. Make it come back. Shelly Avery (00:54:00): Yeah. Krissy Dyess (00:54:00): Oh, no. Can we get that? Rob Collie (00:54:06): I couldn't help it. Krissy Dyess (00:54:08): No. This is what people need. Honestly, when I heard about this, and I'm surprised when I say Veeva, people are like, "What's Veeva?" And I loved your explanation because it gave so much more detail and history, people need this. Think about like, it gives tap it into how long you've been sitting and giving you that balance. This is amazing. Wow. I'm even more excited about this. Shelly Avery (00:54:31): Well, and I think- Krissy Dyess (00:54:33): I think I can make it another 50 years in the work environment now, like [inaudible 00:54:37]. Rob Collie (00:54:37): I said, that was the plutonium battery that you needed. Shelly Avery (00:54:41): Well, and it's so cool because just like there's a Teams team, there's a Veeva team and they are just getting started. They're integrating LinkedIn learning into Veeva learning and all these other learning platforms. So you can learn right in the UI of Teams and you don't have to single sign on and then MFA and forget your password to log into all these other learning tools. And it allows you to share it right inside of Team, say, "Hey, team, I just did this great learning. I think it'd be great for you." Shelly Avery (00:55:11): And customers can upload their own learning modules to it. There's Veeva topics, which is this Wikipedia where it's self-curated information. And what is great, like we've talked about acronyms at Microsoft, every acronym has a topic page now at Microsoft. So anytime you type an acronym, it hyperlinks it. So I'm chatting you in Teams and I say FHIR. And it's like, what the heck is FHIR? You hyperlink it and it gives you an explanation of what FHIR is. Krissy Dyess (00:55:43): That's game changer in itself. Rob Collie (00:55:46): So, does it also pick up pop culture, like if I type IKR, I know, right? And someone else doesn't know what that means. Usually I'm on the receiving end of this. Someone used an acronym yesterday in a chat with me that I'm sitting there going like, "Oh, what new hipsters saying is this?" And it turned out, no, no, no, no, no. That's the customer, Rob. Krissy Dyess (00:56:08): Here's something really weird too. I love this Veeva thing. I love Teams and all this productivity and pulling all the pieces together. Gosh, back in the day, when I moved from back east to Phoenix out west and I started working at the company I was with, they actually had a meditation person that would come in every so often and they would have us stand up and do exercises. And then even to just like little chair massages and it all- Rob Collie (00:56:41): Please continue. Krissy Dyess (00:56:42): Right. Oh, this is just as amazing. I don't even know what track you got, what meditation track, but I just need this in my day. And so many other people do. Rob Collie (00:56:55): Do you see that? I feel compelled to not even hold the phone steady. I have to move it in a circle, a very gentle circle as I play it into the microphone. I didn't even know I was doing that. Shelly Avery (00:57:06): It makes you want to sway. Rob Collie (00:57:11): Yeah. In the middle of the meditation music, you heard my reminder for my next meeting go off. Oh, it really spoiled the mood. Krissy Dyess (00:57:21): And you haven't reviewed that 50 page slide deck. And then- Rob Collie (00:57:25): That's right. Krissy Dyess (00:57:26): Here it goes. Reality comes right back in. You're like, "Oh, okay. Veeva, Veeva, help me." Shelly Avery (00:57:32): I Mean, not to pitch, I'm not selling Veeva anymore. I'm a user of it, but those are also things it does. It gives you alert in the beginning of the day that says, "Hey, Shelly, here's what your day looks like. You got these six meetings. Here's a PowerPoint that you were working on, that might go with this meeting. Do you need to review it?" The Outlook team has also built in, I don't know if you guys have seen this. In Outlook now, you can create 25 minute meetings, 45 minute meetings or 55 minute meetings that either start five minutes late or in five minutes early to give that bio break meeting buffer between meetings. Krissy Dyess (00:58:14): That's right. Shelly Avery (00:58:14): Because when you're fully remote, all I do is sit around and I click the join button all day. I need to go refresh my drink, I need to stand up, I need to stretch. And so, again, we talked about culture at Microsoft earlier, and Satya has been on multiple news outlets talking about how we were the customer zero for Veeva and for this workplace balance. And it's so incredibly crazy to me how much people care about people. It's what we need to do as a human race. We just need to care about people more and allowing technology to play a part in that. It's so cool that we have that. Hopefully organizations take advantage of it for their employees. So more people can have ... It's just the little things- Krissy Dyess (00:59:06): It is the little things. Shelly Avery (00:59:06): You mentioned, Krissy, earlier, it's the little things, like five minute less meetings. It's a sign of respect. Let me use the restroom. Don't be mad at me if I'm not on at the top of the hour. I need two minutes to jump from my last meeting to switch my train of thought to get into the next one. And I think that it's super cool that I get to be a part of a company that's offering that to others. And I hope the rest of the world sees it and gets to take advantage of it. Krissy Dyess (00:59:35): This week, just recently, because I am seeing the five minute grace period, the meetings start five after, but I just, this week, because now people are starting to creep in at 10 after. So it's like everybody expects that five minute because exactly like you said, you're on back-to-back meetings, you don't get a break, but now that five minutes, now it's okay if you're 10 minutes after. Then it's going to be 15. Right? Rob Collie (00:59:59): Yeah. It's like back when I used to teach classes, I would tell people we're going to take a five minute break and we'll resume in 10. Right? Shelly Avery (01:00:08): Yeah. Krissy Dyess (01:00:09): That's right. Rob Collie (01:00:10): But if I tell you it's a 10 minute break, it becomes a 15 minute break. You can't have that. So just say, "Five minute break, but I'll see you in 10 minutes." Krissy Dyess (01:00:17): When I was training, there was no break. So all my students out there- Rob Collie (01:00:20): You just powered through? Krissy Dyess (01:00:22): Because there was so much cool things that I ... I was like, "No breaks. Let's keep going." And they're looking at me. Rob Collie (01:00:28): In the morning, everybody please come in, sit down at a seat that has a book in front of it. And in the bag next to it, is your astronaut diapers for the day. Krissy Dyess (01:00:38): Don't drink water or you might have to go. Rob Collie (01:00:41): Yeah, yeah. We have capitas. Krissy Dyess (01:00:43): I was a different person back then. Now I'm embracing the Veeva and the breaks. I feel sorry for all my students, but that's what I did, because there was so much cool stuff. No breaks. Rob Collie (01:00:52): While we're on this topic, just briefly, this Veeva thing, it seems like one of those technologies that it's not the only thing like it, for sure. But it can be used for good, but it could also be used in a very dark way, if we're not careful. When we were talking to Jen [Stirrup 01:01:08] on a recent podcast, even dashboards reports and things can be used as a form of workplace surveillance. I do see all of the glass half full potential here. Are there any concerns about customers saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll use this for the positive, the meditation and the humane," but then they just turn around and roll it out as like the Amazon horror stories of the driver's not allowed to take bathroom breaks. And this is a means of enforcing that. Shelly Avery (01:01:36): Yeah. I think there is fear of that. I mean, I know a ton of people they put duct tape over their cameras and they don't want windows hello because they think the world's spying on them. There are just people that have that fear. Rob Collie (01:01:49): I don't know any of those. Shelly Avery (01:01:51): Yeah. But I think Microsoft is trying to protect customers a little bit in this area, that you are the only one that can see your data. Everything else is anonymous. Now, if you're a team of one and you report to your manager, obviously the manager is going to know it's you or a team of two, there are those things. But as you go up from a manager one to an M two, to a director, to a VP, and then all the way up to HR, unless you're a very, very small company, the data is segregated into demographics, and geographies, and departments, and roles, and skills, and tenure. And they slice and dice that data to learn insights as to how one population is performing or working over another population. Shelly Avery (01:02:42): I think it was one engineering group at Microsoft that was really, really being overworked. Not that they weren't all being overworked. I'm sure everybody is overworked in every position at every company everywhere. But there was this one in particular organization at Microsoft, I think they were putting in like 18 hour days. It was ridiculous. And the feedback they got from these individuals was, "We have to work after hours because we are in meetings all day." And they were individual contributor. They were coders. They needed that three to four hours to get that line of code written or tested or whatever. Shelly Avery (01:03:17): They made a meeting free Wednesdays. They literally wouldn't allow people to have meetings. Now you could collaborate with people and set your own, but no internal or manager type meetings those days. And the productivity of that group after three or four months, just completely changed. And so using the data, that's what the data is meant to be there for. Now, there are people in the world that are just going to make Ponzi schemes. They're just evil people. Data can be used, I'm sure in malicious ways. I think Microsoft is trying their best to make it so they can't be super micromanagement at least down to the individual level. Rob Collie (01:04:02): It's a certainly a very, very challenging frontier for a technology company, right? We're going there as an industry. It's inevitable. It's happening. There's no point in trying to say, "Oh, no, let's put up the firewall here." We're seeing this thing. This goes back to my original, something I said a long time ago in this discussion about how certain things don't go through a computer very well. I think this is one of those examples. We're seeing it with Facebook and YouTube. Technology companies, they're in the position now, these companies, of being the arbiters of truth and there's no algorithm. Rob Collie (01:04:36): There's actually a really great YouTube video, or this one guy in the UK talks about, there is no algorithm for truth, but we've created these platforms that are the primary disseminators of information in the world and they're completely and forever ill equipped to be arbiter of truth. Wow, look at the world that we're in. So, I don't think this particular topic is on that scale. It doesn't have that same reach. I don't think as the other things, but I think it's a cousin of those problems in some ways. It's a more solvable problem, I think, than the Facebook and YouTube problem that we're seeing. But this is where the real stuff is. Is like, how do we deploy these things in a way that is a net benefit to humanity? And not just as a net benefit to shareholders. Shelly Avery (01:05:27): Exactly. Rob Collie (01:05:28): That's attention, especially I think in the United States. It's a very different dynamic like in Europe, for instance. I can imagine the adoption profile of something like Veeva in Europe will be very different than in the USA. Shelly Avery (01:05:40): Well, it will have to meet European standards. European has GDPR around privacy laws. And so there might be different settings or features that can or can't be enabled in a product like Veeva in UK or in Europe to comply with those. Rob Collie (01:05:58): A lot of consumer products in the United States, they have to meet California standards. Shelly Avery (01:06:03): Exactly. Rob Collie (01:06:04): And then because of that, the whole country is California in terms of its standards, because you're manufacturing product. Software's a little different, it can be tuned differently in different places. Shelly, I have really enjoyed this conversation and thank you so much for making the time. You also get a gif of yourself. Why don't have to be mentioned that. Krissy Dyess (01:06:19): A G-I-F not G-I-F-T. Gif. Rob Collie (01:06:22): Right. Not a gift, but it is a gift- Krissy Dyess (01:06:24): It's a gift or a gif. Rob Collie (01:06:29): Or a gif. Yeah. Shelly Avery (01:06:29): Yay. Fun. Rob Collie (01:06:29): Yeah. Krissy Dyess (01:06:29): And you could frame it. Rob Collie (01:06:29): It needs to be a movable frame. We could sell it as a

This week we talk about Power BI in the context of the wider Power Platform, by which we mean Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse -  the oft forgotten data store underlying so many elements of the Power Platform ecosystem.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

This week we discuss the current state of management reporting and how it has moved on over the past decade or so.The world has moved on from flat, static reports in SQL Reporting Services and self-service reporting is becoming easier, but what about the perception of self service?  We often see that senior executives see self service as difficult and time-consuming, which with modern tools such as Power BI or Tableau, it needn't be.The breadth of what is required has grown too - from financials to sales and inventory and broader information from social media and other external data sources.Finally the questions being asked of the data have become more mature - moving from simply what happened to why it happened and what will happen.As a result, management reporting is turning into more of an application that a traditional report - from a read only report, we are writing back narratives and context.  This comes with its own data management challenges and businesses need to start asking how long that keeps having business value.For more information on snapshots in Power BI, take a look at this.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

Welcome back to the Clearly Podcast, Season 2.In this episode we discuss what we have learnt from starting the podcast and talk about the topics we want to cover.In season 2, we will be spreading our wings into some of the broader areas of the Azure data platform, the impact of low-code and no-code platforms on software development, and what machine learning to mean to your business.We will be welcoming some new guests, and hopefully hearing from some old friends too.From Monday, September 6, we will be back to publishing every Monday for the next few months.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

We didn't know what to expect when we sat down with Greg Beaumont, Senior Business Intelligence Specialist at Microsoft specializing in serving Microsoft's Healthcare space customers' technical Power BI issues.  What we got was an insightful, delightful, and impactful conversation with a really cool and smart human! References in this Episode: The Game Azure Health Bot The Future Will Be Decentralized-Charles Hoskinson Spider Goats Episode Timeline: 3:10 - The magic of discovery with the Power Platform, It's all about the customers(and Greg has a LOT of customers!), and Greg's Data Origin Story 21:10 - The IT/Business Gap, Getting good BI and keeping data security is a tricky thing, The COVID Challenge hits Healthcare 43:00 - Power BI-Not just a data visualization tool, a very cool discussion on Genomics and using data to save lives, the importance of Data Modelling 59:10 - The Bitcoin Analogy, The VertiPaq Engine and when is Direct Query the answer 1:08:30 - We get a little personal with Greg, Azure/Power BI integration and Machine Learning, Cognitive Services and Sentiment Analysis Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest is Greg Beaumont from Microsoft. Like one of our previous guests, hopefully, Greg has one of those interface jobs. The place where the broader Microsoft Corporation meets its customers at a very detailed and on the ground level. On one hand, it's one of those impossible jobs. More than 100 customers in the healthcare space look to Greg as their primary point of contact for all things technical, around Power BI. That's a tall order, folks. And at the same time, it's one of those awesome jobs. It's not that dissimilar, really, from our job here at P3. Rob Collie (00:00:45): In a role that, first of all, you get broad exposure to a tremendous number of organizations and their problems, you learn a lot super, super quickly. When you're doing it right, your work day is just nonstop magic. The power platform is magic and not really because of the technology, but instead because of its impact on the people who use it, who interact with it, who benefit from it, whose lives are changed by it. And again, I can't stress this enough, software usually doesn't do this. And as we talked with him, Krissy and I just couldn't stop nodding, because we could hear it, he lives it, just like we do. And I hope that just leaps out of the audio for you like it did for us. Rob Collie (00:01:32): No surprises here, Greg didn't start his life as a data professional. He's our second guest on this show, whose original training was in biology. And so, some familiar themes come back again, that good data professionals come from a wide variety of backgrounds, that the hybrid tweeners between IT and business are really where the value is at today. And I love this about Greg, that we made a point of talking about how much easier it is today to break into the data profession than it's ever been and what an amazing thing that is to celebrate. Rob Collie (00:02:06): We talked about COVID and specifically its impacts on the industry. How that has served as a catalyst for many organizations to rethink their analytic strategy, the implications of remote work, data privacy and security. And of course, it wouldn't be an episode of Raw Data, if we didn't nerd out about at least one thing. So, we get a little bit into genomics and the idea of DNA and RNA as forms of biological computer code. And as you'd expect, and want, Greg is far from a one dimensional data professional, just such an interesting person, authentically human, a real pleasure to speak with, so let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:47): Ladies and gentlemen, could I have your attention, please. Rob Collie (00:02:51): This is the Raw Data by P3 adaptive podcast with your host, Rob Collie. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:13): Welcome to the show, Greg Beaumont. How are you? Greg Beaumont (00:03:17): I'm doing well. How are you all? Rob Collie (00:03:19): I think we're doing pretty well. Greg Beaumont (00:03:19): Awesome. Rob Collie (00:03:20): Business is booming. Data has turned out to be relatively hot field, but I think it's probably got some legs to it. And the Microsoft platform also, well, it's just kind of kicking ass, isn't it? So, business wise, we couldn't be better. I think personally, we're doing well, too. We won't go into all that. What are you up to these days? What's your job title and what's an average day look for you? Greg Beaumont (00:03:39): So, I'm working in Microsoft and my title is Technical Specialist. And I'm a Business Intelligence Technical Specialist, so I focus almost exclusively on Power BI and where it integrates with other products within the Microsoft stack. Now, I'm in the Microsoft field, which is different from a number of guests you've had, who work at corporate and we're working on the product groups, which is that I'm there to help the customers. Greg Beaumont (00:04:01): And you hear a lot of different acronyms with these titles. So, my role is often called the TS. In the past, it was called a TSP. It's just a change in the title. Sometimes you might hear the title, CSA, Cloud Solution Architect. It's very similar to what I do, but a little bit different. But effectively from an overarching standpoint, our goal in the field as Technical Specialists is to engage with customers, so that they understand how and where to use our products, and to ensure that they have a good experience when they succeed. Rob Collie (00:04:29): Your job is literally where the Microsoft organism meets the customers. Greg Beaumont (00:04:34): Yep. Rob Collie (00:04:35): That's not the role I had. I was definitely on the corporate side, back in my days at Microsoft. I think the interaction between the field and corporate has gotten a lot stronger over the years. I think it's a bit more organic, that interplay, that it used to feel like crossing a chasm sort of thing. And I don't think that's really true anymore. Greg Beaumont (00:04:54): At a green, I think that's by design, too. So, with the more frequent release schedules and also kind of how things have changed under Satya, customer feedback drives the roadmap. So when these monthly updates come out, a lot of it is based off of customer demand and what customers are encountering and what they need. So, we're able to pivot and meet the needs of those customers much more quickly. Rob Collie (00:05:15): Yeah, you mentioned the changing acronyms, right? I mean like yes. My gosh, a thousand times yes. It's almost like a deliberate obfuscation strategy. It's like who's what? Why did we need to take the P off of TSP? I mean, I'm sure it was really important in some meeting somewhere, but it's just like, "Oh, yeah, it's really hard to keep track of." It's just a perpetually moving target. But at the same time, so many fundamentals don't change, right? The things that customers need and the things that Microsoft needs to provide. The fundamentals, of course, evolving, but they don't move nearly as fast as the acronym game. Greg Beaumont (00:05:52): Right. I think that acronym game is part of what makes it difficult your first year here, because people have a conversation and you don't know what they're talking about. Right? Rob Collie (00:06:00): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Greg Beaumont (00:06:00): And if they just spelled it out, it would make a lot more sense. Rob Collie (00:06:03): Krissy was talking to me today about, "Am I understanding what Foo means?" There's an internal Microsoft dialect, right? Krissy was like, "Is Foo like X? Is it like a placeholder for variable?" I'm like, "Yes, yes." She's like, "Okay. That's what I thought, but I just want to make sure." Krissy Dyess (00:06:18): That's why there's context clues in grade school really come into play when you're working with Microsoft organization, because you really got to take in all the information and kind of decipher it a bit. And those context clues help out. Greg, how long have you been in that particular role? Has it been your whole time at Microsoft or are have you been in different roles? Greg Beaumont (00:06:36): So, I should add, too, that I'm specifically in the healthcare org, and even within healthcare, we've now subspecialized into sub-verticals within healthcare. So, I work exclusively with healthcare providers, so people who are providing care to patients in a patient care setting. I do help out on a few other accounts, too, but that's my primary area of responsibility. Greg Beaumont (00:06:55): So, I started with Microsoft in 2016. I was actually hired into a regional office as what's called the traditional TSP role and it was data platform TSP. So, it was what used to be the SQL Server TS role. A few months later, the annual realign happened, I got moved over to Modern Workplace because they wanted to have an increased focus on Power BI, and I had some experience in that area. Plus, I was the new guy, so they put me into the experimental role. A year later, that's when they added the industry verticals and that's when I moved into what is kind of the final iteration of my current role. And the titles have changed a few times, but I've effectively been in this role working with healthcare customers for over four years now. Rob Collie (00:07:35): And so, like a double vertical specialization? Greg Beaumont (00:07:37): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:07:37): Healthcare providers, where there's a hierarchy here? Greg Beaumont (00:07:40): Yeah, yeah. Rob Collie (00:07:41): Those are the jaw dropping things for me is sometimes people in roles like yours, even after all that specialization, you end up with a jillion customers that you're theoretically responsible for. Double digits, triple digits, single digits in terms of how many customers you have to cover? Greg Beaumont (00:07:58): I'm triple digits. And that is one of the key differences from that CSA role that you'll see on the Azure team is they tend to be more focused on just a couple of customers and they get more engaged in kind of projects. And I will do that with customers, but it's just, it's a lot more to manage. Rob Collie (00:08:14): Yeah. What a challenging job. If you think about it, the minimum triple digit number is 100, right? So, let's just say, it's 100 for a moment. Well, you've got 52 weeks a year plus PTO, right? So, you're just like, "Okay." It is very, very difficult to juggle. That's a professional skill that is uncommon. I would say that's probably harder than the acronym game. Greg Beaumont (00:08:37): Yeah, there's been times I was on a vacation day and I got a call. I didn't recognize the number. I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to have to route this to somebody because I'm off today." And they're like, "Well, I'm the VP of so and so and we need to do this." And I'm like, "Okay, I got to go back inside and work now, because this is an important call." So, you have to be flexible and you're correct, that it makes it a challenge to have that work-life balance also, but the work is very rewarding, so it's worth it. Rob Collie (00:09:01): Yeah. It's something that vaguely I have a sense of this. I mean, transitioning from corporate Microsoft to, I mean, you can think of my role now as field. I'm much, much closer to the customers than I ever was at corporate. And yes, Brian Jones and I talked about it a little bit. And this is a bit of an artifact of the old release model that it was like every few years, you'd release a product, which isn't the case anymore. But that satisfying feeling of helping people, like even if you build something amazing back at Microsoft in the days that I was there, you were never really around for that victory lap. You would never get that feedback. It even never make it to you. Rob Collie (00:09:37): It was years later muted whereas one of the beautiful things about working closely with customers and our clients with Power BI, and actually the Microsoft platform as a whole, is just how quickly you can deliver these amazingly transformational like light up moments that go beyond just the professional. You can get this emotional, really strong validating emotional feeling of having helped. And that is difficult to get, I think even today, probably, even with their monthly release cycles, et cetera. By definition, you're just further removed from the "Wow" that happens out where the people are. Greg Beaumont (00:10:15): Yep. And I'm sure you all see that, too, with your business is that a lot of work often goes into figuring out what needs to be in these solutions and reports, but when you actually put it in the hands of leaders, and they realize the power of what it can provide for their business, in my case for their patients, for their doctors, for their nurses, it becomes real. They see it's actually possible and it's not just a PowerPoint deck. Rob Collie (00:10:38): And that sense of possibility, that sense of almost child-like wonder that comes back at those moments, you just wouldn't expect from the outside. I had a family member one time say, "Oh, Rob, I could never do what you do." Basically, it was just saying "How boring it must be, right?" It's so boring working with software, working with..." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? This is one of the places in life where you get to create and just an amazingly magical." It's really the only word that comes close to capturing it. You just wouldn't expect that, right? Again, from the outside like, "Oh, you work in data all day. Boring." Greg Beaumont (00:11:17): I'd add to that, that I'd compare it to maybe the satisfaction people get out of when they beat a game or a video game. That when you figure out how to do a solution and it works and you put in that time and that effort and that thought, there's that emotional reward, you get that I built something that that actually did what they wanted it to do. Rob Collie (00:11:35): Yeah. And after you beat the video game, not only did that happen, but other people's lives get better as a result of you beating this game. It's just like it's got all those dynamics, and then some. All these follow on effects. Greg Beaumont (00:11:46): It's like being an athlete and enjoying the sport that you compete in. Rob Collie (00:11:50): Yeah. We're never going to retire. We're going to be the athletes that hang on way too long. Greg Beaumont (00:11:56): Yep. Rob Collie (00:11:58): So, unfortunately, I think our careers can go longer than a professional athletes, so there's that. I can't even really walk up and down stairs anymore without pain, so. So what about before Microsoft? What were you up to beforehand and how did you end up in this line of work in the first place? Greg Beaumont (00:12:15): Sure. And I think that's actually something where listeners can get some value, because the way I got into this line of work, I think today, there's much more opportunity for people all over the world from different socioeconomic backgrounds to be able to break into this field without having to kind of go through the rites of passage that people used to. So, I was actually a Biology major from a small school. Came from a military family. I didn't have corporate contacts or great guidance counseling or anything like that. My first job right out of school was I said, "Oh, I got a Biology major. I got a job at a research institution." They're like, "Okay, you're going to be cleaning out the mouse cages." And it was sort of $10.50 an hour. Greg Beaumont (00:12:53): So, at that point, I said, "Okay, I got to start thinking about a different line of work here." So, I kind of bounced around a little bit. I wanted to get into IT, but if you wanted to learn something like SQL Server, you couldn't do it unless you had a job in IT. As an average person, you couldn't just go buy a SQL Server and put it in your home unless you had the amount of money that you needed to do that. Side projects with Access and Excel. Small businesses did things probably making less than minimum wage and side gigs, in addition to what I was doing for full-time work to pay the bills. Eventually caught on with a hospital where I was doing some interesting projects with data using Access and Excel. They wouldn't even give me access to Crystal Reports when we wanted to do some reporting. That was really where I kind of said , "Data is where I want to focus." Greg Beaumont (00:13:41): We did some projects around things like Radon Awareness, so people who would build a new house now, they're like, "Oh, I have to pay $1500 for that Radon machine down in the basement." But when you talk to a thoracic surgeon and their nursing team and you hear stories about people who are nonsmokers, perfectly healthy, who come in with tumors all over their lungs, you realize the value there and by looking at the data of where there's pockets of radon in the country reaching out to those people has value, right? I think it's that human element where you're actually doing something that makes a difference. So, that kind of opened my eyes. Greg Beaumont (00:14:14): I then after that job, I got on with a small consulting company. I was a Project Manager. It was my first exposure to Microsoft BI. It was actually ProClarity over SQL Server 2005 and we were working with data around HEDIS and Joint Commission healthcare performance measures for one of the VA offices. So, I was the PM and the Data Architect was building the SSIS packages, built out kind of skeleton of an analysis services cube. He asked me to lean in on the dashboarding side, and that's also where I started learning MDX because we were writing some MDX expressions to start doing some calculations that we were then exposing in ProClarity. And at that point, it was like, "This is magic." Greg Beaumont (00:14:57): From a used case perspective, what they were doing traditionally doing was they'd send somebody in from some auditing agency, who would look at, I think it was 30 to 60 patient records, for each metric and then they take a look at where all of the criteria hit for that metric, yes or no. And it would be pass/fail, how good is this institution doing of meeting this particular expectation. So, it would be things like, "Does a patient receive aspirin within a certain amount of time that they've been admitted if they have heart problems?" Something like that. With looking at it from a data perspective, you can look at the whole patient population, and then you could start slicing and dicing it by department, by time of day that they were admitted, by all of these different things. Greg Beaumont (00:15:38): And that's when I kind of said, "This is really cool, really interesting. I think there's a big future here." And I kind of decided to take that route. And from there, I got on with a Microsoft partner, where I stayed for about six years. And that's kind of where I was exposed to a lot of very smart, very gifted people. And I was able to kind of learn from them and then that led to eventually getting a job at Microsoft. But to make a long story short, today, you could go online and get Power BI Desktop for free. There's training resources all over the place, and you could skill up and get started and get a great job. I'd like to tell people take the amount of time you spend every night playing video games and watching television, take half that time and devote it to learning Power BI and you'll be amazed at how far you get in six to 12 months. Rob Collie (00:16:24): That's such good advice. I'm not really allowed to play a lot of video games, so I might need more time than that. But I had my time to do that years ago, learning DAX and everything. A couple of things really jumped out at me there. First of all, you're right, it was almost like a priesthood before. It was so hard to get your foot in the door. Look, you had to climb incrementally, multiple steps in that story to just get to the point where you were sitting next to the thing that was SSIS and MDX which, again, neither of those things had a particularly humane learning curve. Even when you got there, which was a climb, you get to that point and then they're like, "And here's your cliff. Your smooth cliff that you have to scale. If you wanted a piece of this technology," right? Rob Collie (00:17:11): You wanted to learn MDX, you had to get your hands on an SSAS server. The license for it. And then you had to have a machine you could install it on that was beefy enough to handle it. It's just, there's so many barriers to entry. And the data gene, I like to talk about, it does. It cuts across every demographic, as far as I can tell, damn near equally everywhere. Let's call it one in 20. It's probably a little less frequent than that. Let's call it 5% of the population is carrying the data gene and you've got to get exposure. And that's a lot easier to get that exposure today than it was even 10 years ago. Greg Beaumont (00:17:50): I'd completely agree with that. The people in this field tend to be the type of people who likes solving puzzles, who like building things that are complex and have different pieces, but who also enjoy the reward of getting it to work at the end. You've had several guests that have come on the show that come from nontraditional backgrounds. But I'm convinced that 20 years ago, there were a lot of people who would have been great data people, who just never got the opportunity to make it happen. Greg Beaumont (00:18:14): Whereas today, the opportunity is there and I think Microsoft has done a great job with their strategy of letting you learn and try Power BI. You can go download the dashboard in a day content for free and the PDF is pretty self-explanatory and if you've used excel in the past, you can walk through it and teach yourself the tool. I think the power of that from both the perspective of giving people opportunity and also building up a workforce for this field of work is amazing. Rob Collie (00:18:42): Yeah. I mean, all those people that were sort of in a sense like kind of left behind, years ago, they weren't given an avenue. A large number of them did get soaked up by Excel. If they're professionally still active today, there's this tremendous population of Excel people if they were joining the story today, they might be jumping into Power BI almost from the beginning, potentially. And of course, if they were doing that, they'd still be doing Excel. But there's still this huge reservoir of people who are still tomorrow, think about the number of people tomorrow, just tomorrow. Today, they're good at Excel and tomorrow, they will sort of, they'll have their first discovery moment with Power BI. The first moment of DAX or M or whatever, that's a large number of people tomorrow who are about to experience. It's almost like did you see the movie The Game? Greg Beaumont (00:19:36): I have not. Rob Collie (00:19:37): There's this moment early in the movie where Michael Douglas has just found out that his brother or something has bought them a pass to the game. And no one will tell him what it is. He meets this guy at a bar who says, "Oh, I'm so envious that you get to play for the first time." Also, this is really silly, but it's also like the ACDC song For Those About To Rock, We Salute You. For those about to DAX, we salute you, because that's going to happen tomorrow, right? Such a population every day that's lighting up and what an exciting thing to think about. Do you ever get down for any reason, just stop and think, "Oh, what about the 5000 people today who are discovering this stuff for the first time." That is a happy thing. Greg Beaumont (00:20:16): Yeah, I actually had a customer where one of their analysts who turned out to be just a Power BI Rockstar, he said, "I'd been spending 20 years of my life writing V-lookups, and creating giant Excel files. And now, everything I was trying to do is at my fingertips," right? And then within a year, he went from being a lifelong Excel expert to creating these amazing reports that got visibility within the organization and provided a ton of value. Rob Collie (00:20:42): And that same person you're talking about is also incredibly steeped in business decision-making. They've been getting a business training their whole career at the same time. And it's like suddenly, you have this amazingly capable business tech hybrid, that literally, it just like moved mountains. It's crazy. We've talked about that a lot on the show, obviously, the hybrids, just amazing. And a lot of these people have come to work for us. Rob Collie (00:21:09): That's the most common origin story for our consultants. It's not the only one. I mean, we do have some people who came from more traditional IT backgrounds, but they're also hybrids. They understand business incredibly well. And so, they never really quite fit in on the pure IT side, either. It's really kind of interesting. Greg Beaumont (00:21:26): Yeah, I think there's still a gap there between IT and business, even in kind of the way solutions get architected in the field. It's understanding what the business really wants out of the tool is often very different from how IT understands to build it. And I think that's where people like that provide that bridge, to make things that actually work and then provide the value that's needed. Rob Collie (00:21:47): There's such valuable ambassadors. It's just so obvious when IT is going to interact with a business unit to help them achieve some goal. It's so obvious that, of course, who you need to engage with IT. IT thinks, "We need to engage with the leaders of this business unit." They've got the secret weapon, these hybrid people that came up through the ranks with Excel. The word shadow IT is perfect. These people within the business, like they've been Excel people for their entire careers, they have an IT style job. Rob Collie (00:22:22): Almost all the challenges that IT complains about with working with business, you take these Excel people and sort of put them in a room where they feel safe. They'll tell you the same things. They're like, "I had exactly the same problems with my 'users,' the people that I build things for." And yeah, there's such a good translator. And if the communication flows between IT and business sort of through that portal, things go so much better. That's a habit. We're still in the process of developing as a world. Greg Beaumont (00:22:51): Yeah. And in healthcare that actually also provides some unique challenges. With regulation and personal health information, these Excel files have sensitive data in them, and you have to make sure it's protected and that the right people can see it. And how do you give them the power to use their skills to improve your organization, while also making sure that you keep everything safe. So, I think that's a hot topic these days. Rob Collie (00:23:15): Yeah. I mean, it's one of those like a requirement, even of the Hello World equivalent of anything is that you right off the bat have to have things like row level security and object level security in place and sometimes obfuscation. What are some of the... we don't want to get to shop talky, but it is a really fascinating topic, what are the handful of go-to techniques for managing sensitive healthcare information? How do you get good BI, while at the same time protecting identity and sensitivity. So often, you still need to be able to uniquely identify patients to tie them across different systems, can identify them as people. It's really, really, really tricky stuff. Greg Beaumont (00:24:02): And I think just to kind of stress the importance of this, you can actually go search for look up HIPAA wall of shame or HIPAA violation list. When this information gets shared with the wrong people, there's consequences and can result in financial fees and fines. And in addition to that, you lose the trust of people whose personal information may have been violated. So, I think a combination of you said things row level security and object level security as a start, you can also do data masking, but then there's issues of people export to Excel. What do they do with that data afterwards? Greg Beaumont (00:24:37): And then there's going to be tools like Microsoft Information Protection, where when you export sensitive information to Excel, it attaches an encrypted component. I'm not an MIT expert. I know how it works. I don't know the actual technology behind it. But it attaches an encrypted component where only people who are allowed to see that information can then open that file. So, you're protecting the information at the source and in transit, but you're still giving people the flexibility to go build a report or to potentially use data from different sources, but then have it be protected every step of the way. Greg Beaumont (00:25:11): So like you said, without getting too techie, there's ways to do it, but it's not just out of the box easy. There's steps you have to go through, talk to experts, get advice. Whether it's workshops or proof of concepts, there's different ways that customers can figure that out. Rob Collie (00:25:28): Yeah. So because of that sort of mandatory minimum level of sensitivity handling and information security, I would expect, now that we're talking about it, that IT sort of has to be a lot more involved by default in the healthcare space with the solutions than IT would necessarily be in other industries. Another way to say it, it's harder for the business to be 100% in charge of data modeling in healthcare than it is in other industries. Greg Beaumont (00:26:02): Yep. But you can have a hybrid model, which is where the business provides data that's already been vetted and protected and there might be other data that doesn't have any sensitive data in it, where it's game on, supply chain or something like that. But having these layers in between, the old way of doing things was just nobody gets access to it. Then there was kind of canned reporting where everybody gets burst in the reports that contain what they're allowed to see. But now, you can do things in transit, so that the end users can still use filters and build a new report and maybe even share it with other people. And know that whoever they're sharing with will only be able to see what they're allowed to see. It gets pretty complex, but it's definitely doable and the customers that are doing it are finding a lot of value in those capabilities. Rob Collie (00:26:48): That's fundamentally one of the advantages of having a data model. I was listening to a podcast with Jeffrey Wang from Microsoft and he was talking about it. And I thought this was a really crisp and concise summary, which is that the Microsoft Stack Power BI has a model-centric approach to the world whereas basically, all the competitors are report centric. And what does that mean? Why does that even make a difference? Well, when you build a model, you've essentially built all the reports in a way. You've enabled all of the reports. You can build many, many, many, many, many like an infinite number of different reports based on emerging and evolving business needs without having to go back to square one. Rob Collie (00:27:28): In a report-centric model, which is basically what the industry has almost always had, almost everywhere, outside of a few notable examples, Power BI being one of them. When a report centric model, every single change, I remember there being a statistic that was just jaw dropping. I forget what the actual numbers were, but it was something like the average number of business days it took to add a single column to a single existing report. It was like nine business days, when it should just be a click. And that's the difference. And so, preserving that benefit of this model centric approach, while at the same time, still making sure that everyone's playing within the right sandbox that you can't jump the fence and end up with something that's inappropriate. Very challenging, but doable. Greg Beaumont (00:28:15): Yep. That reminded me of an old joke we used to tell in consulting and this was back in the SharePoint Performance Point with Analysis Services days is there be a budget for a project, there'd be change requests along the ways, they discover issues with the data. And at the very end of the project, they rushed the visualization to market. And they're like after six months, with 10 people dedicated on this project, "Here's your line chart." Rob Collie (00:28:39): Yeah. I had a director of IT at a large insurance company one time, looking me in the eye and just brutally confess. Yeah, my team, we spent three months to put a dot on a chart. And that's not what you want. Greg Beaumont (00:28:59): Right, right. Rob Collie (00:29:01): That was unspoken. This was bad. To the extent that you're able to tell, what are some of the interesting things that you've seen in the healthcare space with this platform recently? Anything that we can talk about? Greg Beaumont (00:29:15): Yeah, so I think I'd start with how everything changed with COVID. Just because I think people would be interested in that topic and kind of how it changed everything. I actually had a customer yesterday at a large provider who said, "COVID was the catalyst for us to reconsider our investment in analytics, and that it spurred interest from even an executive level to put more money into analytics because of the things that happened." So obviously, when it hit everybody was, "What in the world is going on here?" Right? "Are we even going to have jobs? Is the whole world going to collapse or is this just going to be kind of fake news that comes and goes?" Everybody was unsure what was going on. Greg Beaumont (00:29:50): At the same time, the healthcare providers, a lot of them were moving people to work from home and these were organizations where they had very strict working conditions because of these data privacy and data security considerations, and all of a sudden, you're in a rush to move people home. So, some of my counterparts who do teams, they have some just amazing stories. They were up all night helping people set up ways to securely get their employees to a work-from-home type experience, so that they only had essential workers interacting with the patients, but then the office workers were able to effectively conduct business from home. Greg Beaumont (00:30:25): Additionally, there were use cases that were amazing. So, Microsoft has now what's called the Cloud for Health where we're effectively taking our technology and trying to make it more targeted towards healthcare customers and their specific needs, because we see the same types of use cases repeat from customer to customer. One of those use cases that came out of COVID was called Virtual Visits. And I actually know the team that built that solution, but because of patients who were on COVID, they didn't know how contagious it was. Greg Beaumont (00:30:56): There were people being put on ventilators, who weren't allowed to see their families and they were setting up a team's application, where people were actually able to talk to their family and see their family before they went under, right? There were chaplains who were reading people their last rites using video conferencing, and things like that. So, it was pretty heavy stuff, but I think from a healthcare perspective, it showed the value technology can provide. Greg Beaumont (00:31:21): And from our perspective in the field, it's like we're not just out there talking about bits and bytes. It kind of hit home that there's real people who are impacted by what we're doing and it adds another kind of layer of gravity, I'd call it, taking what you do seriously, right? I had another customer, they were doing some mapping initiatives with some of the COVID data because they wanted to provide maps for their employees of where the hotspots were. Greg Beaumont (00:31:46): And we were up till I think 11:00 at night one night working through a proof of concept. And they said, "Yeah, what's next is we also want to start mapping areas of social unrest." I said, "Wow, social unrest. Why are you worried about that?" And they said, "Well, we expect because of this lockdown, that eventually there's going to be rioting and issues in all different parts of the world." And at that time, I just kind of didn't really think about that, but then a lot of those things did happen. It was kind of just interesting to be working at night and hearing those stories, and then seeing how everything kind of unfolded. Greg Beaumont (00:32:18): Another example, look it up, there's an Azure COVID Health Bot out there and then there's some information on that, where you can ask questions and walk through your symptoms, and it will kind of give you some instructions on what to do. Another one that is even popular now is looking at employees who are returning to work. So, when people return to work find out vaccination status, "Are you able to come back to work? Are you essential? Are you nonessential?" I don't think a lot of customers were prepared to run through that scenario when it hit. Greg Beaumont (00:32:48): So, having these agile tools where you can go get your list of not only employees, but maybe partners that refer people to your network, because you might not have all the referring doctors in your system. So with Power BI, you can go get extracts, tie it all together and then build out a solution that helps you get those things done. I'd say it was eye opening. I think for customers and also for myself and my peers, that we're not just selling widgets. We're selling things that make a difference and have that human perspective to it. Rob Collie (00:33:20): Yeah, that does bring it home, doesn't it? That statement from an organization that COVID was the catalyst, evaluating and investing in their analytic strategy? Greg Beaumont (00:33:29): Yep. Rob Collie (00:33:30): Being in BI, being an analytics is one of the best ways to future proof one's career because at baseline, it's a healthy industry, there's always value to be created. But then when things get bad, for some reason, whatever crisis hits, it's actually more necessary than ever because when you've been in a groove when a an industry or an organization has been in an operational groove for a long time, any number of years, eventually, you just sort of start to intuitively figure it out. There's a roadmap that emerges slowly over time. Now, even that roadmap probably isn't as good as you think it is. If you really tested your assumptions, you'd find that some of them were flawed and analytics could have helped you be a lot more efficient even then. Rob Collie (00:34:14): But regardless, the perception is that we've got a groove, right? And then when the world completely changes overnight, all of your roadmaps, your travel roadmaps, none of them are valid anymore. And now, you need a replacement and you need it fast. And so, what happens is, is that analytics spending, BI spending, whatever you want to call it, or activity, actually increases during times of crisis. So, you got a healthy baseline business. It's an industry that's not withering and dying in good times, but it actually it's like a hedge against bad times. Rob Collie (00:34:47): When I saw that research years and years ago, when I was working at Microsoft Corporate, we just come out of the dot-com crack up, we'd seen that BI spending it across the IT industry was the only sector that went up during that time where everything else was falling. It's like, "Oh, okay." So, not only do I enjoy this stuff, but I really should never get out of it. It's like one of the best future proofing career moves you can make is the work in this field. And so, I mean, we've seen it, right? The early days of the COVID crisis, you're right when no one knew the range of possible outcomes going forward was incredibly wide. The low end and the high end were exponentially different from one another. Rob Collie (00:35:29): And so, we experienced in our business, sort of a gap in spring and early summer last year. We weren't really seeing a whole lot of new clients, people who are willing to forge a brand new relationship. Again, what happens when a crisis hits? You slam on the brakes. No unnecessary spending first of all. Let's get all the spending under control, because we don't know as a company what's going to happen in the industry, right? You see a lot of vendor spending freezes and of course, to other companies, we're a vendor, right? So, our existing clients, though, doubled down on how much they used us and how much they needed us. Rob Collie (00:36:08): And then later in the year, the new client business returned, and we actually ended up, our business was up last year, despite that Q2 interruption and sort of making new friends. And this year, holy cow like whatever was bottled up last year is coming back big time. And so, yeah. You never really want to be the ghoul that sort of morbidly goes, "Oh, crisis." From a business perspective, yeah, anything that changes, anything that disrupts the status quo tends to lead to an increased focus on the things that we do. Greg Beaumont (00:36:43): Yeah, I think something you said there, too, was when you don't know what's going to happen was when the business intelligence spending increased. I mean, the intelligence and business intelligence, it's not just a slogan. The purpose of these tools is to find out the things you don't know. So when there's uncertainty, that's when BI can provide that catalyst to sort of add some clarity to what you're actually dealing with. Rob Collie (00:37:06): Yeah, I've been using, even though I'm not a pilot, I've never learned to fly a plane or anything. I've been using an aviation metaphor lately, which is windshield is nice and clear. You might not be looking at the instruments on your cockpit very much, right? You know there's not a mountain in front of you, you can see how far away the ground is. And you could sort of intuit your way along, right? But then suddenly, whoosh clouds. And oh, boy, now, you really need those instruments, right? You need the dashboards, you need the altimeter, you need the radar. You need all that stuff so much more. Rob Collie (00:37:37): And so, and our business has kind of always been this. The reason I've been using this metaphor is really for us, it's like given how fast we operate, and I think you can appreciate this having come from a Microsoft partner consulting firm before Microsoft years ago, our business model, we move so fast with projects. We're not on that old model with the original budget and the change orders and all of that. That was all dysfunctional. Rob Collie (00:38:01): It was necessary, because of the way software worked back then, but it was absolutely dysfunctional. It's not the way that you get customer satisfaction. So, we've committed to the high velocity model. But that means seeing the future of our business financially two months in the future is very difficult relative to the old sort of glacial pace, right? If there's a mountain there, we're going to have months to turn around it. Krissy Dyess (00:38:26): To add a bit to your analogy there, Rob. I am married to a pilot and I have gone up in the small tiny airplane. And before the gadgets, there's actually the map. The paper map, right? So, you had the paper map, which my husband now would hand to me. And he'd tell me, "Okay, let me know the elevations of different areas to make sure we're high enough, we're not going to crash into the mountains." Krissy Dyess (00:38:47): What's happened is people just they got used to different ways that they were doing things. They were forced into these more modern ways. And I think even now, this wave of seeing this catalyst we can change and how are other people changing is also driving the people to seek help from others in terms of getting guidance, right? Because even though you've had the change, it doesn't necessarily mean that the changes that you made were 100% the right way and you can learn so much from others in the community and the people that are willing to help. Krissy Dyess (00:39:24): And I think that's one of the things too, that our company provides as a partner, we're able to kind of go alongside. We've seen what's works, what doesn't work, what are some of those pitfalls? What are those mountains approaching? And we're really able to help guide others that want to learn and become better. Rob Collie (00:39:42): Yeah. I mean, this is us getting just a little bit commercial, but you can forgive us, right? That high velocity model also exposes us to a much larger denominator. We see a lot at this business that accumulates. The example I've given before is and this is just a really specific techy, so much of this is qualitative, but there's a quantitative. It's sort of like a hard example of like, "Oh, yeah, that's right. This pattern that we need here for this food spoilage inventory problem is exactly the same as this tax accounting problem we solved over there, right?" As soon as you realize that you don't need to do all the figuring out development work, you just skip to the end. Rob Collie (00:40:22): And really, most of the stuff that Krissy was talking about, I think, is actually it's more of the softer stuff. It's more of the soft wisdom that accumulates over the course of exposure to so many different industries and so many different projects. That's actually really one of the reasons why people come to work here is they want that enrichment. Greg Beaumont (00:40:38): Yeah, that makes sense. Because you see all these different industries and you actually get exposed to customers that are the best in the business for that type of, whether it be a solution or whether it be a product or whether it be like a framework for doing analytics or something like that. So, you get that exposure and you also get to contribute. Rob Collie (00:40:55): Even just speaking for myself, in the early days of this business, when it was really still just me, I got exposure to so many business leaders. Business and IT leaders that, especially given the profile of the people who would take the risk back in 2013, you had to be some kind of exceptional to be leaning into this technology with your own personal and professional reputation eight years ago, right? It was brand new. So, imagine the profile of the people I was getting exposed to, right? Wow, I learned so much from those people in terms of leadership, in terms of business. They were learning data stuff from me, but at the same time, I was taking notes. Greg Beaumont (00:41:33): Everybody was reading your blog, too. I can't count the number of times I included a reference to one of your articles to help answer some questions. And it was the first time I was introduced to the Switch True DAX statement. And then I'd print that. Rob Collie (00:41:47): Which- Greg Beaumont (00:41:48): Sent that link to many people. "Don't do if statements, do this. Just read this article." Rob Collie (00:41:53): And even that was something that I'd saw someone else doing. And I was like, "Oh, my God, what is that?" My head exploded like, "Oh." Yeah, those were interesting days. I think on the Chandu podcast, I talked about how I was writing about this stuff almost violently, couldn't help it. It was just like so fast. Two articles a week. I was doing two a week for years. There was so much to talk about, so many new discoveries. It was just kind of pouring out in a way. Krissy Dyess (00:42:24): Greg, you came in to the role around 2016. And to me 2017 was really that big year with the monthly releases where Power BI just became this phenomenon, right? It just kept getting better and better in terms of capabilities and even the last couple years, all the attention around security has been huge, especially with the health and life science space. And last year, with this catalyst to shift mindsets into other patterns, working patterns using technology, do you feel like you've seen any kind of significant shifts just compared to last year or this year? Greg Beaumont (00:43:05): Yeah. And so something that burns my ears every time I hear it is when people call Power BI a data visualization tool. It does that and it does a great job. Rob Collie (00:43:11): I hate that. Greg Beaumont (00:43:12): But it's become much more than that. When it launched, it was a data visualization tool. But if you think about it at that time, they said, "Well, business users can't understand complex data models, so you have to do that in analysis services." Then they kind of ingested analysis services into Power BI and made it more of a SaaS product where you can scale it. There's Dataflows, the ETL tool, which is within Power BI, which is an iteration of Power Query, which has been around since the Excel days. So, now you have ETL. You have effectively from the old SQL Server world, you have the SSIS layer, you have the SSAS layer. With paginated reports, you have the SSRS layer. And you have all these different layers of the solution now within an easy to use SaaS product. Greg Beaumont (00:43:55): So this evolution has been happening, where it's gobbling up these other products that used to be something that only central IT could do. And now, we're putting that power by making it easier to use in the hands of those analysts who really know what they want from the data. Because if you think about it, the old process was is you go and you give the IT team your requirements, and they interpret how to take what you want, and translate it into computer code. Greg Beaumont (00:44:21): But now, we're giving those analysts the ability to take their requirements and go do it themselves. And there's still a very valid place for central IT because there's so many other things they can do, but it frees up their time to work on higher valued projects and I see that continuing with Power BI, right? But like we're adding AI, ML capabilities and data volumes keep increasing then capabilities I think will continue to expand it. Rob Collie (00:44:46): Greg, I used to really caused a storm when I would go to a conference that was full of BI professionals. And I would say that something like, "What percentage of the time of BI project, traditional BI project was actually spent typing the right code?" The code that stuck, right? And I would make the claim that it was less than 1%. So, it's like less than 1% of the time of a project, right? And everyone would just get so upset at me, right? But I just didn't understand why it was controversial. Rob Collie (00:45:19): Like you describe like yeah, we have these long requirements meetings in the old model. Interminably long, exhausting, and we'd write everything down. We'd come up with this gigantic requirements document that was flawed from the get-go. It was just so painful. It's like the communication cost was everything and the iteration and discovery, there wasn't enough time for that. And when I say that the new way of building these projects is sometimes literally 100 times faster than the old way. Like it sounds like hyperbole. Greg Beaumont (00:45:53): It's not. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:45:54): It can be that fast, but you're better off telling people, it's twice as fast because they'll believe you. If you tell them the truth, they'd go, "Nah, you're a snake oil salesman. Get out of here." Greg Beaumont (00:46:07): Yeah. And I think the speed of being able to develop, too, it's going to basically allow these tools to be able to do things that people didn't even dream of in the past. It's not just going to be traditional business use cases. I know in healthcare, something that's a hot topic is genomics, right? Genomics is incredibly complex then you go beyond Power BI and into Azure at that point, too and Cloud compute and things like that. Greg Beaumont (00:46:31): So, with Genomics, you think about your DNA, right? Your DNA is basically a long strand of computer code. It is base pairs of nucleic acids, adenine, thymine, and guanine, cytosine that effectively form ones and zeros in a really long string. Rob Collie (00:46:46): Did you know it effortlessly he named those base pairs? There's that biology background peeking back out. Greg Beaumont (00:46:52): I did have to go look it up before the meeting. I said, "Just in case this comes up, I need to make sure I pronounce them right," so. Rob Collie (00:46:59): Well, for those of us who listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed, that is going to sound super impressive, that string there. Greg Beaumont (00:47:05): Yeah. I should call out, too, though that I'm not a genomics expert, so some of what I'm saying here, I'm paraphrasing and repeating from people I've talked to who are experts, including physicians and researchers. So, this long string of code, if you sequence your entire genome, the file is about 100 gigabytes for one person, okay? At 100 gigabytes, you can consume that, but if you want to start comparing hundreds of people and thousands of people in different patient cohorts, all of a sudden, it gets to be a lot of information and it gets very complex. Greg Beaumont (00:47:35): If you think of that strand of DNA as being like a book with just two letters that alternate, there's going to be paragraphs and chapters and things like that, which do different things. So, one of the physicians I spoke to worked with Children's Cancer. Here's kind of where the use case comes in. So, you take something breast cancer where there's BRCA1 or BRCA2, BRCA1, BRCA2 genes where if you have it, there's a measurable increased probability that you'll get that type of cancer within a certain age range. There's a lot of other diseases and cancers, where it might be 30 genes. And depending on different combinations of those genes, it changes the risk of getting that specific type of cancer. Greg Beaumont (00:48:17): But this physician told me that there are specific children's cancers, where they know that if they have certain combinations of genes, that they have a very high probability of getting this cancer. And when the child actually feel sick and goes to the doctor, it's already spread and it's too late. So, if you can do this sequencing, basically run it through machine learning algorithms, so it will determine the probability, you could effectively catch it at stage zero. Because these cancers, it's something that could be related to growth hormones and as you're growing up, and as you become an adult, you're then no longer at risk of getting that childhood cancer. So, if they could identify it early and treated at stage zero, instead of stage 4, it sounds sci-fi, but the tools are there to do it. Greg Beaumont (00:49:01): It just never ceases to amaze me that you watch the news and they talk about self-driving cars and identifying when a banana is ripe, and things like that. But it's like, you know what? These same tools could be out there changing people's lives and making a measurable difference in the world. I think just especially post COVID, I'll expect to see a lot more investment in these areas. And also, interest because I think that might be one of the positives that comes out of this whole experience. Rob Collie (00:49:27): I do think that the sort of the worlds of Medicine and Computer Science are on a merging course. Let's not call it collision course. That sounds more dramatic. There is a merging going on. You're right DNA is biologically encoded instructions by an RNA. The mRNA vaccine is essentially injecting the source code that your body then compiles into antibodies. It's crazy and it's new. There's no two ways about it. Rob Collie (00:49:56): mRNA therapies, in general, which of course they were working on originally as anticancer and sort of just like, "Oh, well, we could use it for this, too." And there's all kinds of other things too, right? Gosh, when you go one level up from DNA or some point of abstraction, you get into protein folding. And whoa, is that... Greg Beaumont (00:50:15): Crazy, yeah. Rob Collie (00:50:16): ... computationally. We're all just waiting for quantum computers, I think. Greg Beaumont (00:50:20): Now, I'll have to call out that I'm making a joke here, so people don't take me seriously. But if you think about it, the nucleus in each of your cells contains an important model of that DNA, right? There isn't just a central repository that everything communicates with. You have a cache of that DNA in every cell in your body, except red blood cells, which perform a specific task. There may be more of the power automated the human body. But cheap attempt at a joke there, so. Rob Collie (00:50:44): Well, I like it, I like it. Let's go in with both feet. I've also read that one of the reasons why it's difficult to clone adult animals is because you start off with your original DNA, but then you're actually making firmware updates to certain sections of the DNA throughout your life. And so, those edits that are being made all the time are inappropriate for an embryo. Greg Beaumont (00:51:09): Yep. Rob Collie (00:51:10): And so, if you clone, you create an embryo, right? And now, it's got these weird adult things going on in it. That's why things kind of tend to go sideways. It can all come back to this notion of biological code and it's fascinating. A little terrifying, too, when you start to think of it that way. I've listened to some very scary podcasts about the potential for do-it-yourself bioweapon development. There was this explosion back, in what, in the '90s when the virus and worm writers discovered VVA. Remember that? We call them the script kiddies that would author these viruses that would spread throughout the computer systems of the world. And a lot of them, the people writing these things were not very sophisticated. They weren't world renowned hackers. Greg Beaumont (00:51:53): For every instance where you can use this technology to cure cancer, you're right that there's also the possibility of the Island of Dr. Moreau, right? You go look up CRISPR Technology, C-R-I-S-P-R, where they can start splicing together things from different places and making it viable. And 10 years ago, they had sheep that were producing spider webs in their milk and it's just, there's crazy stuff out there if you kind of dive into the dark depths of Biology. Now that we went down the rabbit hole, how do we correct course, right? Rob Collie (00:52:23): Well, we did go down a rabbit hole, but who cares? That's what we do. Greg Beaumont (00:52:26): Even you kind of step it back up to just kind of easy use cases in healthcare, so one of the ones that we use as a demo a lot came from a customer, and this was pre-COVID. But something as simple as hand washing, you don't think about it much. But when you're in the hospital, how many of those people are washing their hands appropriately when they care for you. And there's some white papers out there, which are showing that basically, there are measurable amounts of infections that happen in hospitals due to people not washing their hands appropriately. So, a lot of healthcare organizations will anonymously kind of observe people periodically to see who's doing a good job of washing their hands. Rob Collie (00:53:04): I was going to ask, how is this data collected? Greg Beaumont (00:53:06): This customer actually had nurses who were using a clipboard and they would write down their notes, fax it somewhere, and then somebody would enter it into Excel. So, there was this long process. And with another TS, who covers teams, we basically put a PLC together in a couple days, where they enter the information into a power app within teams, so they made their observation, entered it in. It did a write back straight to an Azure SQL Database at that time. Now, they might use the data verse. And then from Azure SQL DB, you can immediately report on it and Power BI. It even set up alerts, so that if somebody wasn't doing a good job, you could kind of take care of the situation, rather than wait for two days for the Excel report to get emailed out, and maybe lower the infection rates in the hospital. Greg Beaumont (00:53:53): So, it saved time from the workers who are writing things down and faxing things just from a sheer productivity perspective. But it also hopefully, I don't know if it will be measurable or not, but you'd have some anticipated increase in quality, because you're able to address issues faster. And that's the simplest thing ever, right? You can spend a billion dollars to come up with a new drug or you can just make sure are people washing their hands. Rob Collie (00:54:17): Both data collection and enforcement, they happen to be probably the same thing. There's like, "Oh, I'm being watched." The anonymity is gone. That's a fascinating story. Okay. What kinds of solutions are you seeing these days? What's happening out in the world that you think is worth talking to the audience about? Greg Beaumont (00:54:38): We're seeing this ability to execute better where the tools are easier to use, you can do things faster, but there's still challenges that I see frequently out there. So, I know something that you all are experts in its data modeling and understanding how to take a business problem and translate it into something that's going to perform well. So, not only do you get the logic right, but when somebody pushes a button they don't have to go to lunch and come back, they get a result quickly. That's still a challenge. And it's a challenge, because it's not always easy, right? I mean, it's the reason cubes were created in the first place was because when you have complex logic and you're going against a relational database, the query has to happen somewhere, but like that logic. Greg Beaumont (00:55:19): So take for example, if somebody wants to look at year over year percent change for a metric and they want to be able to slice it by department, maybe by disease group, maybe by weekend versus weekday, and then they want to see that trend over time. If you translate that into a SQL query, it gets really gnarly really fast. And that problem is still real. One of the trends I'm seeing in the industry is there's a big push to do everything in DirectQuery mode, because then you can kind of manage access, manage security, do all of those necessary security things in one place and have it exist in one place. Greg Beaumont (00:56:00): But when you're sending giant gnarly SQL queries back to relational databases, even if they're PDWs with multiple nodes, it gets very expensive from a compute perspective, and kind of when you scale out to large number of users, concurrency is still an issue. So that's something where you look at recently what Power BI has come out with aggregations and composite models. That's some of the technology that I think can mitigate some of those problems. And even if we think about something like Azure synapse, right? You can have your dedicated SQL pools then you can have a materialized view. A materialized view is effectively a cache of data within synapse, but then you can also have your caches in Power BI, and kind of layer everything together in a way that's going to take that logic and distribute it. Greg Beaumont (00:56:46): Does that make sense? Rob Collie (00:56:47): It does. I think this is still a current joke. The majority of cases where we've encountered people who think they want or need DirectQuery, the majority of them are actually perfect poster children case studies for when you should use cash and import mode. Right? It turns out the perceived need for DirectQuery, there is a real percentage of problems out there for which DirectQuery is the appropriate solution and it is the best solution. But it's the number of times people use it is a multiple of that real ideal number. Rob Collie (00:57:17): I think part of it is just familiarity. Still, I've long talked about how we're still experiencing as an industry the hangover from most data professionals being storage professionals. Everyone needed a database, just to make the wheels go round. The first use of data isn't BI. The first use of data is line of business applications. Every line of business application needed a database, right? So, we have minted millions of database professionals. this is also why I think partly why Power BI gets sort of erroneously pigeonholed as a visualization tools, because people are used to that. They're used to, we have a storage layer and reports layer, that's it, right? Rob Collie (00:57:56): Reporting services was Microsoft's runaway successful product in this space. Paginated reports is still around for good reason. And I think that if you're a long-term professional in this space with a long history, even if you're relatively young in the industry, but you've been working with other platforms, this storage layer plus visuals layer is just burned in your brain. And this idea of this like, "Why do you need to import the data? Why do you need a schedule? Why do you need all this stuff?" It's like as soon as people hear that they can skip it, and go to DirectQuery, they just run to

In this episode, Alexander and Simon talk about DataOps, the April update of Power BI Desktop (and especially Charticulator and the Power Automate visual), Microsoft buying Nuance, news in InTune, some new Microsoft hardware and Microsoft Defender for unmanaged devices! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, we discuss our experiences of helping customers to migrate from Excel to Power BI.We talk frequently about how much Excel we see being used for data storage, manipulation and visualization when we start working with new clients. Furthermore, we talk extensively about the risks of proliferation of those spreadsheets, especially when they're replicated and changed by multiple users within the organization.So how do you move your users from Excel to Power BI? It's not as simple as merely moving the spreadsheets into Power BI models, the trick is stopping users dependency on Excel as a business tool, moving them to use structured business systems linked to Power BI where they can get a universally understood source of the truth.When doing this it's essential to understand your users motivations and dependancies on Excel so you can provide better solutions to their reporting and data needs. We work with the contention that most users don't want to be Excel formula experts so they're more satisfied when you give them better alternatives.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

This week we take a look at Power BI Report Server - the on-premise way to deploy Power BI reports.We consider when to use it and when not to, the limitations, and the costs.In general though, the default position should probably be to use the cloud service as Report Server will always lag behind in terms of features, and comes with bigger cost overheads since it needs to be deployed on an infrastructure that has to be purchased and maintained.The main (only?) compelling reason to use it it likely to be regulatory: that you are processing data that cannot for regulatory (or contractual) reasons be hosted in the cloud.  That is not to imply that the cloud is any less secure - indeed it is probably more secure than on-premise infrastructure - but regulation frequently lags behind technology.For more information, read this detailed comparison of features and an introduction to the pre-requisites (including licensing).You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

OK, it isn't quite yet - we still have to wait until April 2 for the GA release, but we do have a release date and price.Premium per user offers many of the premium features, licensed on a user by user basis.The main features it opens up are:Paginated reports (so we can now more easily centralise all business reporting)Increased refresh rate (so we can have nearer real time data)Pipelines (to centralise the data structures)AI/ML features.The key features excluded areEmbeddingPBI Report ServerThe detailed announcement can be found here and the details of what it can and can't do can be found in the FAQ.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

We all have different communities we rely on. When working in technology those communities can become essential to our development and understanding of what we do. Whether that's getting help from a forum or meeting fellow like-minded professionals to share experiences and help each other when facing a specific challenge, communities are an important part of our daily lives.In this podcast, we talk about community. It's a slight diversion from our normal subject matter, although focussed on our Power BI communities with 2 community leads in Glen Accardo (Houston, Texas Power BI Community Lead) and Tom Gough (West Midlands, UK Power BI Community Lead). We also have the pleasure of being joined by Jena Coffie who has worked establishing, growing and maintaining numerous communities. Of particular interest is Jena's thoughts and advice on how companies can setup communities for their own products and services and how the voices of those communities can guide product development.This is a really interesting discussion on how community has effected our professional lives and we hope you enjoy it.Our guests can be found on Linkedin as follows:Jena Coffie https://www.linkedin.com/in/jena-coffie-47663428/Glen Accardo https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenaccardo/ You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

This week we talk about Application Lifecycle Management.It is important to remember that BI projects, like all software projects, should be considered in a cycle, rather than a linear process.  That is to say that the deployed report (or application) should provide a base for iteration.Most organisations are good at managing the environments to promote code from development to release, but all too often this becomes the end of the chain.  We now have deployment pipelines that give something of a DevOps deployment experience.  Source control is the big problem with Power BI because PBIX files are databases and therefore stateful and resistant to source control.  The template file can be source controlled, but as a binary does not make it easy to use source control tools, such as branching and merging.Application Lifecycle Management is also applicable to the wider Power Platform, although since the codebase is essentially stateless, source control concepts are a lot easier.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

This week we talk about colour.  Colour is generally a central element of branding, but we must also think about accessibility and the emotional response colour generates.  Red is frequently associated with stop or bad, whereas green with good or go.  Similarly, we may say we feel blue when we're a bit down.  At the same time, we need ensure our choice of colours are accessible to people with colour blindness, and not relying entirely on colour to tell your data story.If you want to select an exact colour from an image, and get the RGB code, you can use a colour picker, such as this one.  You can use a theme generator to create a selection of complementary colours, and put these colours into a theme file.  If you don't want to create the JSON file from scratch (and let's face it, who does?),  you can use this handy tool from PowerBI.tips.  Coloring for Colorblindness gives a reasonably simple  introduction to creating accessible colour schemes.Finally, make sure the colour is included in the non-function testing - including testing the colours on different screens.  If you're not yet doing non-functional tests, you should be.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

This week we talk to special guest, Reza Rad, about governance.  If you have read any of the previous podcast descriptions, you will probably be familiar with Reza's work.  If you're not aware of Reza yet, you should fix that as he is one of the leading experts in the world in Power BI.Today, we cover all aspects of data and BI governance, from data sources through to outputs via training and encouraging a data culture.One of the key aspects of governance is getting the overall architecture right.  If at all possible, this should be in place from day one.  Often, though, with the increase in "citizen developer" tools we can end up in something similar to the old "Excel hell" and a lack of a single source of truth.The more code that can be re-used, such as creating shared datasets, the easier your task will be.  We will talk a little more about this in a future episode on Application Lifecycle Management and how it applies (and doesn't apply) to BI projects.Beyond the technological measures, we also need to think about the cultural and "soft" elements of making the architecture stick.  Key to this is creating suitably tailored training to the different audiences in an organisation, and providing the appropriate documentation.One of the critical challenges thrown up by modern BI tools is an increased expectation that everything can be done quickly - bypassing the normal controls.  At the same time, you don't want to just kill everybody's enthusiasm.In the wider Azure context, tools such as Data Loss Prevention policies and Azure Information Protection can help, but be wary of being too reliant on technology over policy and organisational culture. Finally, the Centre of Excellence tool kit can provide a valuable accelerator to governance on the Power Platform more generally.Reza's website Radacad is a treasure trove of information across all things Power BI, and also the place to go to download Power BI Helper.  Reza can also be found on Twitter and LinkedIn In addition, Tabular Editor and DAX Studio are fantastic tools to help manage development.The Power BI Summit takes place on line this April and tickets are available now.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

This is episode 179 recorded on February 5th, 2021 where John & Jason deep dive on the Best Practices Analyzer in Tabular Editor, an external tool for Power BI Desktop. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

The capabilities of business intelligence tools have changed over the past 15 years. In the past a specialist or IT function would build and deliver reports. Modern tools such as Power BI now have the capability for users to create and edit their own reports and we see many users taking advantage of that development and devolving report creation across the organisation.While this is an important development, self service BI needs to be planned and part of your reporting strategy. In this episode we talk through all aspects of self service BI from the basics of how we define it all the way through to self service strategies, tips for being successful and some experiences of what to avoid.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

This week we discuss an often neglected part of many BI implementations: testing.  It isn't glamorous, it isn't the headline-grabbing side of a project, but it is vital.  After all, what use is a report if it doesn't show the right information.We talk about different approaches to testing, from structured tests following a script to unstructured exploratory testing.  We discuss why both are important elements of a rounded test plan, and why it should never simply be left to the developers to test their own reports.  And to be clear - we are not suggesting development teams would cynically pass on reports they know to be broken, but rather that when you have been working on piece of code for weeks, it's hard to see where errors might be creeping in.Finally, we talk about non-functional testing.  This is probably the most neglected part of an already neglected process.  It is vital that a report performs well, has readable fonts and suitable colours.  If any of these aren't the case, the report consumers will quickly be turned off and revert to other ways of reporting data.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

In this episode we discuss project management for business intelligence. The complexity of BI projects has increased  significantly in the past 10 years so a structured approach to implementation is required. The historical approach to business systems implementations has been to use the standard reports that come with the application and amend at the end of the project. The complexity of BI means those days are long behind us.We discuss how a program management approach is required to modern implementions where BI is a separate project in of itself that can be implemented alongside a business system. We also discuss approaches to BI project management and how to make your implementation successful for the long term.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

As we seem to mention this on almost every episode, we decided to devote an entire podcast to it - pre-aggregation.To start off with, a matter of terminology.  The official terminology is "aggregation".  In the title we talk about pre-aggregation - this is a matter of clarity since every aggregate function (sum, average etc) carries out an aggregation.  What is officially called aggregation is a technique that aggregates the data in-memory during the loading process and link these aggregations to your measure definitions.The documentation describes the basics of how to build aggregations, but as ever, Reza Rad has a fantastic tutorial on how to do this.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

In this episode we offer practical advice to anyone thinking of starting a career as a Power BI consultant. We talk about:What a Power BI consultant doesIf an average day in the life of a Power BI consultant exists, what it looks likeWhat experience and skills are useful to build onSkills v character and what we value the mostQualificationsWhat we look for when hiring consultantsCV/ResumesInterview preparationHow to approach the market and the companies you may like to work forHow to work with recruitersIn this episode we're joined by Jon Styles who leads specialist Microsoft recruitment agency Northcote Dynamics. Jon can be found at:www.northcote-dynamics.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-styles-91858b35/You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/If you have any specific questions about any aspect of our podcast please send an email to podcast@clearlysolutions.net.

This week, we are mostly being rude about pie charts.  To be clear – we like pies, just not pie charts.  At the heart of the issue, is that bar charts give a better view of overall magnitude as well as the relationships between categories.We then move on to 3D charts – which are not in the standard visualisation set in Power BI – which always end up much harder to use than their 2D counterparts.  Be careful of overcrowding the page.  This not only looks cluttered and confusing but also creates a performance issue.  Multiple pages with drillthroughs can create a much clearer story with the data.Think about how you are going to maintain the report into the future.  Around 6 visuals on a page would be a good rule of thumb.Be careful of custom visuals since they don't work with Power BI Report Server (ie hosting on premises).When it comes to maps, think about how you can use the data to make real-world decisions.  Shailan's fly tipping report can be found here.  ArcGIS is generally the better mapping tool in Power BI, but one to use mainly if you really need mapping and can make use of its additional layers of data.The Decomposition Tree is a great way of managing the interactive exploration of data that our older listeners may remember from such tools as Pro-clarity and Performance Point Services.For the developers amongst us, you can create your own custom visuals which may allow you to work with libraries like D3JS.  Once again, do you really need to do it?You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

This is episode 172 recorded on December 14th, 2020 where John & Jason talk with Tessa & Jereon, from the Power BI Product Team, about some of the announcement in this month's release of Power BI Desktop. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

Videoclase Semana 2: Microsoft Power BI Desktop Curso Power Bi Docente: Diego Garrido

This week we venture into the world of hairdressing - and the 2 programming languages at the core of Power BI.In a nutshell, M is the language used for importing data into Power BI and DAX the language used to manipulate data inside the Power BI data model.Reza Rad  deals with the differences in his blog post M or DAX? That is the question.Chris Webb posts a huge amount of really good material on his blog at Cross Join.DAX Patterns is one of the richest resources for writing DAX measures, by the authors of The Definitive Guide to DAX (also on Amazon US).Once you are starting to get beyond the basics in either language, the external tools such as DAX Studio and Visual Studio Code offer much better development environments for developing your code.The full documentation on DAX can be found here and the documentation for M is here.Check out Luke McAdam's Instagram and Soundcloud for more of his music.If you are only here for the haircare products, you can also order DAX Short and Neat online.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

In this episode we discuss Row Level Security in Power BI. Data security is a subject discussed as part of every implementation and a critical consideration when implementing any IT system, not just Power BI.Key points from the discussion- What is Row Level Security within Power BI- Where to use Row Level Security and where not to use it- The administration of Row Level Security and why administration alone may be a reason not to use Row Level Security- Performance impacts of Row Level Security- Data classification for security- Other security considerations such as GDPR and how they may effect how you use Row Level SecurityYou can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

This week we look at big datasets.  And we should be clear, we are simply talking about large volumes - not "Big Data" as defined by volume, variety, and velocity.We discuss options such as using Analysis Services to offload the data processing workloads away from Power BI.  Premium per User is now in public preview, so this could offer a more cost effective long term solution for managing large datasets in Power BI.Direct Query does offer a last-resort solution but typically this is the least performant option, so should be used with caution since slow performance will put users off using the tool.We discuss monitoring performance, and managing a changing landscape.  A report with a low volume of data today could become a large dataset in time and need the approach changing.Finally, we come to data quality - and why it should get fixed at source not in the reporting tool.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

Branding is an important way of engaging with report users, and helping them to feel that the report is about their work.  In this episode, we look at how and why we should brand our reports.Microsoft has some very detailed documentation on how to create theme files here.For those less confident, Power BI Tips has create this handy theme generator.If you don't yet have a palette designed, you could use a tool such as this one.Finally, you could use a theme from the theme gallery as a starting point.For our younger listeners, here is the Wikipedia page on GeocitiesYou can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

This week, we discuss hybrid models.  In short, this involves combining data from direct query or live connection with data that has been imported into the model.There are several reasons why you might want to do this.  As we discussed last week, there are many times that you will need to use a direct query.  The problem is that not all sources (eg Excel) support direct query, meaning we need to import that data.  Equally, if you have a data source using SSAS you don't want to import that as it will flatten the structure.  Finally, we touch on using a hybrid model to provide a pre-aggregated version to access the speed of import and detail of direct query.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

This week, Andy discovers sound effects!We also talk about the relative merits of importing data into the Power BI data model vs querying the data source directly.Import is generally supported by all data sources.  Direct Query and Live Connection are more limited.  Generally speaking, databases are more likely to support Direct Query as well as import; file-based sources tend to only permit import.  A detailed breakdown of sources and supported connection methods can be found here.It is also worth looking carefully at the implications of using Direct Query before choosing it as method.Finally, remember if you are connecting to an Analysis Services model, you should use a live connection, otherwise the structure will be flattened and you will have to rebuild it in Power BI.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

Power BI Licensing may not be the most glamorous subject, but it is important to understand what options you have.This week we discuss the different tiers of Power BI pricing, and what you get for them.  Starting at the free tier, we cover what you can do without a financial investment, through to the Pro licence, aimed at business use, particularly in SMEs all the way up to Premium, offering an Enterprise reporting capability.We should note here, as it's not clear in the discussion, that even at the Premium tier, report creators will need Pro licences as well.An overview of pricing and features can be found on the Microsoft website.If you are looking at whether Premium will be cost effective for your organisation, Microsoft have produced this handy pricing calculator.Finally, Premium per User may offer a more cost effective way for SMEs to unlock premium features.You can download Power BI Desktop from here.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here. To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

In this first episode, we discuss the differences and similarities between Power BI and Excel.  When should you use Power BI?  When is Excel the best tool for the job? And when should you step away from both and look at an entirely different solution?We try to explode the common myth that Power BI is just "Excel on steroids", why you still need Excel, and how Power BI can make your life easier.You can download Power BI Desktop from hereIf you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here. To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

Escucha el Webinar del pasado viernes para aprender algo de las posibilidades visuales de Microsoft Excel y Power BI. pARA SABER MÁS BUSCA EL VIDEO EN EL CANAL DE cREATIVOS lATAM EN yOUtUBE.