Delivering Power Platform Projects: Truths from the Field

I have successfully delivered a number of Power Platform Projects for nearly a year now. Even though I am no longer a Microsoft MVP, I still work hands-on with Microsoft products as well as providing more strategic thought leadership to business leaders. The current blog forms a summary of what's good, and what's not so good, about working with Power Platform projects.

SQLBits: The Data Lifecycle: Decision making with data in Power BI and Fast Focus: Azure Notebooks for Artificial Intelligence

SQLBits Business Intelligence presentation. Data can be viewed as having a product lifecycle, where it can be collected, analysed, visualized, utilized and then monetized. In this session, aimed at business intelligence leaders, we will look at generating ideas and formulating a strategy that could benefit your organization by adding information as an asset to the organization.

User Stories for Agile Business Intelligence

User stories are development tasks often expressed as follows: persona + need + purpose A key component of agile software development is putting people first. User stories put actual business users at the front-and-centre of the conversation. In this post, we will cover the following topics: What makes a good user story? Story template Definition … Continue reading User Stories for Agile Business Intelligence

Data Lineage and Power BI: Why is it important?

The Microsoft Power BI team have released a preview Data Lineage feature and I couldn't be happier! The Power BI lineage view displays the lineage relationships between all the artifacts in a workspace, and all its external dependencies.

Businesses need a clear line of sight on data asset ownership and stewardship. This has traditionally been in the hands of the IT department, but unfortunately the projects can become deprioritized as IT fight other battles elsewhere. IT can do so much, but the business do need to bring things to the table. Hence, we now see accessible tools appearing in technology such as Power BI.

University of Washington Foundations of Data Analysis Course

I'm pleased to announce that the University of Washington are running a Foundations of Data Analysis course, starting in January 2020.  In this 10-week course, you'll learn how to understand and analyze data. We’ll start with fundamental data-related concepts, terminology and ethical considerations. You’ll learn how to articulate business problems and identify required data. Using Microsoft Excel and SQL, you’ll practice gathering, cleaning and organizing data. Finally you’ll use Tableau to effectively describe, analyze and visualize data.

AWS RDS vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database: What does it mean for the business?

From the business intelligence perspective, it is incredibly useful to compare AWS RDS and Microsoft Azure SQL Database. As a freelance industry analyst who has worked with GigaOm, I'm pleased to see the GigaOM Transactional Field Test derived from the industry-standard TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E) report which compares Amazon Web Services Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.

Keynote and Session highlights at ASG Evolve19

I'm excited to be attending ASG Technology's Evolve19 event in Dallas, Texas on October 21 - 23. I'm particularly interested in learning more about metadata management. As I've written previously, I believe that metadata management is often overlooked in data science. It's an important part of obtaining full value from data, and it should be … Continue reading Keynote and Session highlights at ASG Evolve19