Microsoft Fabric: The Connective Tissue That Unifies Your Data Estate

Elevate your Power BI center of excellence (CoE) with this new offering

Information is not the same as knowledge, just as data is not the same as insight. Sometimes the real reason behind the rush to acquire and store massive amounts of data gets lost in the intricacies involved in these activities. While it’s imperative to ensure your architecture and tools are enabling you to collect, cleanse, classify, and store all the data required to help your business run better, it’s just as important to maintain focus on the value your data can deliver and the means to get to that value.

Microsoft has introduced a product called Fabric that makes this effort significantly easier. Microsoft describes Fabric as “an end-to-end, human-centered analytics product that brings together all an organization’s data and analytics in one place.” In other words, all your employees who work with your organization’s data — data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users — can use Fabric to seamlessly collaborate across one unified software as a service (SaaS) platform that delivers the capabilities of Microsoft’s best-known data tools, such as Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory. Not only is it a more unified experience, but the data itself is also more unified in the new OneLake data lake architecture, which eliminates the need for copying and moving data when used by different personas for different purposes (“the OneDrive for data” is an apt analogy).

Fabric and your Power BI CoE

Getting at the actionable insights in your data requires more than just good data analytics tools. If you’ve read our recent blog entitled Do You Need a Power BI Center of Excellence?, you know that Slalom favors an approach to data analytics that puts balanced emphasis on the tools and people involved in your data practice. But you may be wondering how the Power BI center of excellence (CoE) model aligns with the capabilities in Microsoft Fabric.

Learn more about the Power BI center of excellence (CoE) and how Slalom can help you achieve more meaningful collaboration on the path to becoming a data-driven organization.

To gain a better understanding of how this works, it’s best to start from the state that most organizations find themselves in today when it comes to their data analytics practices. As noted by TechTarget,

“many organizations piece together their analytics stack, incorporating BI capabilities from one vendor, AI and machine learning (ML) tools from another, and data ingestion and integration tools from still another. Even those organizations that use only Microsoft for their data management and analytics operations patch together different tools.”

This means that, depending on your role within your organization’s data analytics practice — whether an engineer, scientist, analyst, etc. — you’re probably using a different tool than your teammates in other areas and possibly accessing data that’s been moved or copied from system to system. Such a disparate technology landscape can lead to higher expenses and data silos that leave users uncertain as to whether the data they’re working with is the most current or accurate.

Because Fabric is a unified platform that allows all data users to work with the same data at the same time, performing all the tasks and activities specific to each of their roles, Fabric’s capabilities mesh perfectly with a primary mandate of your Power BI CoE: coordination. Fabric’s ability to unify data and personas within a single platform will provide a strong foundation for your data analytics estate and facilitate stronger coordination between teams. Having a tool like Fabric as the technology foundation of your data analytics practice will make your Power BI CoE’s job of bridging any gaps between IT and business stakeholders that much easier. The by-product of this, of course, is a cohesive data practice that thrives in an environment in which everyone is working toward the same goals.

What are some of the benefits you’ll reap from this better-coordinated, better-aligned approach to data analytics?

• Reduced time to insight by removing the overhead of using multiple, disparate systems
• Improved data quality when using a centralized, lake-first architecture that facilitates a single source of truth
• Potential decrease in total cost of ownership
• Easier, more transparent governance to drive improved compliance with internal data policies and external regulations (for example, GDPR)

To learn more about how a Power BI CoE could boost the success of your data analytics efforts and deliver improved decision-making for your organization’s leadership, check out our ebook, The ABCs of a Power BI CoE. It offers suggestions for achieving better alignment across your people, processes, and technology with solutions for improving data analytics governance and driving better coordination across your departments, functions, and locations.

Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.