Visualizing Insights w/Power BI

It's one thing to collect great big gobs of data, but quite another thing to draw insights and understanding from that information.  Listen in as Christian Gero makes the case for Power BI (surprise: he loves it; absolutely loves it!).

ABOUT: Christian Gero is a Data & AI Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. A recent MBA graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Christian’s career has spanned roles in product management, technical start-ups, and the live music industry. His goal is to help customers realize value from their entire end-to-end digital transformation journey. A data science geek focused on democratizing AI, Christian is one of the dozen people left in the data world who still prefers R to Python.

LINKS: Power BI Desktop (Download); Microsoft Power BI Docs; Free Power BI Training (YouTube), Power BI Whitepapers; follow Christian on LinkedIn

CREDITS: Louis Berman (Host); Christian Gero (Guest); Dan Phillipson / PremiumBeat (Music); Anne Lamb (Intro/Outro); East Coast Studio (Editing)

MORE: visit https://azuresuccess.buzzsprout.com/ for additional episodes, plus transcripts, and more ways to listen to the show. As to your comments and suggestions, please feel free to email your host, Louis Berman, at lberman@microsoft.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Being able to sometimes just to pump the brakes and say, okay, we can do this. Yeah, absolutely. But like, why are we doing it this way? How might we be able to do it in a different way and really try to check every assumption that you make as you're going along. That's really, what's powerful about Microsoft AI platform in mind,

Speaker 2: 0:20

You're listening to, as your success, the podcast by and for Azure professionals, listen in, and you'll be sure to speak your customers March into the cloud. And now your host, Lois Berman.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Azure success. The podcast by end for Azure professionals. That sounds so professional. When I say it, I almost feel I'm an Azure professional employed as an Azure professional position. So I can say that, but I still feel like a poser. So anyway, we're very privileged today to have, as our guests, Christian zero as in zero, definitely not a zero, but it sounds like that one of my fellow cloud solutions, architects, he is relatively new to the it world, but the man packs a lot of punch and lots of interesting experiences. So Christian, tell me how an audio engineer, a GM of a Grammy award winning, uh, album GM, who your company had it, NAACP image award in it. How do you end up at Microsoft? It's a great question. Hashtag growth mindset really? That's uh, that's what it's all about, right? You got my first hashtag this or that. I got to stay true to my Malaya roots. Right. I, uh, I'm a new kid on the block, but yeah, you know, my first job out of college was working for an independent record label based out of Chicago. Uh, fortunate enough to get a couple Grammy nominations, a Grammy win, and a, an NAACP image award nomination for some work that I was a part of. So it really great experience right out of college and transitioned a little bit, a little bit more technical and got increasingly more technical ended up as a product manager in the Bay area for a brief period of time and came to Microsoft because really connected with the mission fell in love with the way that the organization is approaching AI and ML, both from a technological standpoint, but also from an ethical standpoint. And like I said, man, hashtag growth mindset. You know, it's a real thing. And I think that the experiences that I had, you know, outside of the it and the tech world there are, I carry them with me and I'm ready to learn. And onto the next thing I should say by way of apology. That of course, you know, in our post COVID world, Christian and I are in our respective homes, Christian, somewhere outside of DC, I'm out outside of Philadelphia. And you know, so we're basically recording remotely, which is we try to do good. We try to check, but I own a rather expensive recording rig for doing in person. And I'm sure Christian has worked with much more expensive things than me. So just imagine that we have incredibly mellifluous well-tuned voices. We'll try to do the best we can. So we're here today to talk about power BI and what is it, why is it how to pitch it to your clients? And we're going to try to get some clever things that Christian said before I had the audio rolling to have him say him again, he's having very knowledgeable. What is power BI? What is it? Let's start there. Yeah. I mean, at its simplest form, right? It's it's data visualization and it's easy to sort of pigeonhole it like that. But the tech itself is, is so much broader than, than just data visualization. Right? You can do so much within power query, right? So many different kinds of Dax equations to get the sorts of measures that you're looking for out of your data. But it's really the way that from your digital transformation, from that new data estate, how you can really get to that insight and actionable that actionable pain. That's what that's, what power BI really brings is the ability to get some value out of that entire digital transformation. In my book, at least I also just being, I don't want to call myself a neophyte on it cause I've done a significant amount of work on it. I find it a combination of trivially, easy to use and extremely hard to use. Can you talk to that? You know, it's so powerful, I think is maybe one of his problems. Yeah, it definitely is for me coming out of grad school a year ago, I took classes in visualization and to be totally honest, we were using Tableau and Tableau to me, has this really refined a user interface? The UX is fantastic. It has smart features in a way that are really well thought through products and making the switch to power BI. When I joined Microsoft, there was a learning curve. I'm, I'm be the first to admit it. I was initially not a fan. It was hard for me to learn, understand, but as I got more integrated really into the data and AI CSA role, I got to understand the power of it. Right? Yeah. You can do some easy things, some blind plots and chart plots. It's really easy to do that. But the power of the power of the power BI really comes in the robust data modeling and the sort of the ETL that you can do within the tool itself. And so it's really sort of like an onion, right? You start peeling back layers, you start understanding really how deep it goes, even to the point where there's integrated AI functionality within this from, from things like a Q and a where it can take natural language and query your data. Based on that natural language input has things like audio and Mel integration, key influencers, visuals, they're like these really far pushing the envelope types of applications of AI within a visualization software. Nothing else touches this man. I'm serious. It's it's really awesome. Well, that is awesome. And I feel it from you. So that's what we're looking for. But power BI is like one of these weird products, right? It is visualization is great and it works, but you have to have everything behind it. So you were talking about the data estate and how you have to get those ducks in a row to make it have its full life. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah. I mean, so the episode that our colleague Kevin did recently, right? He talks about data estate and there's I tell you, there's better person to get in touch with, if you have a question about data state, like Kevin is your go to guy and I've leaned on him, Kevin howl, one of our colleagues. Yeah. Kevin howl. There's no better guy to really, to lean on. He is like the data estate guru when it comes to this stuff and just being an engagement with him, I've learned so much that really that data estate is a super critical a foundation to your business intelligence, right? To your visualization.

Speaker 3: 6:22

So with that, if you think about it, right,

Speaker 1: 6:25

The state is really sort of the plumbing, right? And that's absolutely essential. We can't do anything without that plumbing, but with power BI, what we start to get is in those CEO CTO sort of business decision maker, conversations, plumbing, doesn't always land. What does land, however, is when you start to sell a spa of five star luxury, four seasons spa that comes in with actionable business insights, visuals that really get from a 35,000 foot cruising altitude down to the front lines of your business of your organization. That's what power BI offers. Now we can't do that without the data estate being set up properly, but being able to understand that sort of end to end journey for our customers, it's really, really powerful. And so it's, it's difficult within power BI because it touches so many different parts of the Microsoft stack that it can often be like a little bit of a stepchild in the corner. And I'm one of the proponents here saying, Hey man, this should be first and foremost, put this on the top of the list. This is huge value for both us as CSS, but primarily for our customers as well.

Speaker 3: 7:29

So this is supposedly an Azure focused show, power BI sort of straddles Azure in lots of different ways. Could you talk about that?

Speaker 1: 7:38

Yeah. So how are BI itself? It can get a little bit confusing and I, you know, those distinctions are tough and there are a number of skews, right? So power BI itself. You can actually have a premium skew that actually runs on an office node and technically has a power platform product. But then there's another version of power BI power BI embedded, which is an Azure node. So it consumes Azure resources. So this power BI sort of floats in between sort of the gray area, the chasm between sort of power platforms and the Azure world. Right? So sellers specialists, CSA is we don't really know who's really responsible for that. Right. And so I think that there's definitely a gap in that knowledge because it doesn't fall squarely in one person's jurisdiction. Right. But in that, there's definitely an opportunity for growth and learning. So I think that if we can sort of lean into that and be like, you know, I'm not afraid to get a little power platform me as a data and AI CSA has it as an Azure focused professional. Right. But if we can really lean into that, we can, we can start to understand that entire overarching journey for our customers. And I think really that's where the value,

Speaker 3: 8:45

I like to think about it the same way I think about dev ops. And I don't mean this in a technical sense, but I mean, in a selling sort of sense, I don't particularly sell dev ops. I still literally don't know if I get compensated for dev ops sort of sale. But, but I do know that it empowers my customers to do all sorts of crazy good things. And those are deploying things like you're saying in Azure, they're deploying data, state services, cosmos, SQL what have you, AI cognitive services, things like that. So, so I think of it as, as an unambiguous. Good. So let's talk about the why and why the customers should adopt this and sort of eat your own headline a little bit before. You're like, it's like, you're amazing. I'm not going to repeat it. I'm going to allow it to come out from your voice. But clearly you love power BI, right? Why?

Speaker 1: 9:37

Yeah. To me, it's, it's the perfect storm really? Right? It touches so many parts, so many competencies that I really love exercising. Right. It starts with that data state and being able to start with sort of that, that layer cake that you've built. Right? So you've built the cake itself, the sheet cake, right? And now we need to start putting the layers on top of we, we put the icing, we put the flowers, you put this fruit on top, right? And so that's really, that whole journey is why I love power BI. So it starts with that data state, you have an ETL process inside the tool you're able to choose what sorts of visualizations, how you want to make that data actually tangible for your users. You can empower those citizen data scientists within your organization using things like certified data sets that allow people within your organization to really explore data on their own and really get excited about the idea of data science. And then from that point, you choose, you know, where you want to put those visualizations. So there's a design aspect, there's a change management aspect, there's a data aspect. And on top of all that stuff, my first love is AI and ML. So you get to use that. And like you said, in one of those episodes, sprinkle a little AI on it. Right. That's exactly what you, that's exactly what you can do here too. I love it because it's so, it's so multifunctional. So cross-discipline, that's what I really like. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 10:50

You mentioned something also about that ethical data and stuff. And I believe ethical data is starting to flow down into power BI as it's trying to float out throughout the rest of our estate. Can you talk to that? Yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:02

Yeah. So that was one of the biggest things that really drew me to this company is the ethical approach that we have to advancing the field of AI. And to me, that's, that's really important just because there's so much inherent bias that comes in when you're training new algorithms or you're doing any sort of research into the future of machine learning that being able to sometimes just to pump the brakes and say, okay, we can do this. Yeah, absolutely. But like, why are we doing it this way? How might we be able to do it in a different way and really try to check every assumption that you make as you're going along. That's really, what's powerful about a Microsoft AI platform, in my opinion. And then as it applies to power BI, right? All those things that you're seeing within Azure, all those AI functionalities, uh, many of them are able to be called within the power BI service itself. So there's starting to be that interplay between of those sprinkle AI on top of it from Azure being pulled into the power BI service. So we can really get that power and that half behind every single product we have in our stack, can I make sort of a plug for yet another thing which I don't sell, but I like to go for it. That is the power platform itself, right? Power BI extensively is the leading product of the power platform. But the power platform is sort of like a whole mess of tinker toy style, programmatic goodness that you used to have to be a professional to play around with, to get value from you had to, and I don't mean professional in the sense that they were paying you to do it, but that you had to be dedicated person who spent weeks, months, years to learn how to do so. I'm under the impression that most people have a similar experience to me when they address power BI it's daunting because it's so powerful, but then they get with it, they start getting value. And I, I think the power platform itself is better than that in that is most of the things compare platforms seem to be easier to approach whether it be batch processes or connectors to talk to cognitive services or stuff like that. But have you started working with power platform in coordination with power BI? I mean, there's definitely a lot of connection that happens there. So a good chunk of power BI is very squarely in the power platform world. Right. And I think you touched on it really plainly, right? I mean to do a lot in Azure, you know, you and I both would open up a visual studio code window and we'll, we'll start hacking away and that's sort of part of the job description, but there comes a time where there's a little bit of a disconnect with our customers there. I think that's where the power of platform really fills that gap is sort of that low code, no code development where you can really, and I said this in one of the reasons, things that I just said about power BI is that you can really start to empower people within your organization to really dive in to data science, to coding, to app development. And what that does is it just, it makes people feel like I can do this too. And right. And so even with that power platform is sort of that first step on how you get to become either a cloud solution architect or, you know, somebody more technical inside your own organization. Everybody starts somewhere. And that power platform really lowers the barrier for people to get into higher tech stuff like the Azure, like the, like I've done my power platform stuff. Now I want to really learn about the data state cause Kevin howl really made me excited about it. You know what I mean? That's cool. That's cool. So we're going to get into the next step of this, which is how to not only have knowledge of how to use it, but how to sell it. And I need that in the best sense of the word, how to convince people that this is a great thing to deal with, but firstly, I want to talk about the Allman brothers. You are like a roadie with them for like four or five years, six years, something like this, I'm still marbling. And I should tell the people on the phone that I have done, not as much roading, but I've certainly done a fair amount in my early twenties. And my universal takeaway from rodeo

Speaker 3: 14:52

Is it sounds incredibly more glamorous than it is. Like I did a gig for the rolling stones where I probably got within five or 600 feet of the stage calling incredibly heavy boxes and not being fed. That's usually my experience. But my assumption is that you probably had a much better experience and I'm still jealous even with the filter of my own experience has been less than good. So could you talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 1: 15:16

Sure. Yeah. It totally wild time in my life. It was my, honestly my first job out of college. Right. And I was, I was on tour with the Allman brothers band for about four and a half years. And it was a great experience. I met people I would never have met otherwise and wouldn't trade it for the world. But like you said, man, a very, very difficult life, very hard, very challenging at the same time, extremely rewarding. Right. Being able to,

Speaker 3: 15:41

They feed you. That's that's my main question they did. They did.

Speaker 1: 15:45

In fact, primarily my breakfast was a tray of bacon.

Speaker 3: 15:48

You can guess that my pants,

Speaker 1: 15:50

Pants size ended up a little bit bigger by the end of tour legs and when it started. Yeah, they did feed me, but I did also have to have a lot of heavy cable, but taught me a lot. They've taught me a lot about work ethic, a lot about teamwork. So I'm happy to have had that experience.

Speaker 3: 16:03

Well, cool. So let's talk about closing the loop on this stuff. So power BI is wonderful. Apparently it has all sorts of technical, wonderful things and clearly the culture and how you approach your thing sounds right. But how do you convince the people who are going to adopt this and tell me who those people are, does it need to be adopted at the CIO level or grassroots or in between? How has that

Speaker 1: 16:25

Yeah, I mean, where I've really seen successes is around actually rallying people that are closer towards the bottom. Not really those C level people top down approaches is difficult for a CSA honestly. And so what I try to do is I go bottom up and I will start to grit these sort of center of excellence going around this stand up meetings, where it comes to, you know, how can we refine this model? How do we do this better for our organization? How do we think about transforming digitally something that was an Excel sheet and a PDF into an active power BI report or dashboard or something that I can then push out to my customers, to my end customers, right? So our customers, customers, and have those customers really engage with something instead of looking at a static sheet. And primarily from the Azure standpoint, the power BI embedded skew is really powerful because the app that you create within the power BI service actually owns the data. So it's, it has this really big implication for our customers, the Microsoft customers, those customers, clients, right? If we are selling some sort, if we as an organization, right, our customers, Microsoft customers are selling something, right? And it's in a digital, it's a web app or something like that. We can embed power BI visualizations inside of web apps or teams or SharePoint, things that already exist. And so we're meeting our end customers where they are. And that's sort of where I found successes, really, really being able to establish that of excellence around the power BI itself and then saying here's all the cool stuff you can do to serve your clients better. Well, you have a report from the field, you'll have a report from the field. Have your clients been saying good things, anything you can quote that I think generally they would be happy. One of the more recent projects that I was on that had a, a good amount of spotlight on it was for one of the big four companies that we support. And there was a COVID impact by the way, very good work on anonymizing in a good way. I try my best. I try my best, but there was a Kobe dashboard that one of their C level executives want to put together. And you know, one of those things where we need it yesterday, right? And so swarmed up with the internal team on the customer side, developers, offshore people in Chicago, all over the globe, right. To get this going. And they really wanted to create a visualization report that showed both the economic impact of COVID itself and how we're seeing signs of vibrancy in the economy. And this is in state local County and zip code economies, right? And so this was like a really tall task and how to be able to do this with signals that go all the way down to things like how many jobs were posted in the County last week, how many construction permits were pulled in a zip code over the last month? So these sorts of really minute economic indicators were, were really the data signals that we were processing, but it launched. Everybody's really happy. It's excited. It's live on this, on this customer's webpage. And hopefully they're generating a lot of business because of it. And it's, and it's all through the amazing stuff that we could do within Azure. And then visualize on top of that with power BI. Excellent. I'm always happy to hear also that we're involved in civic works and helping deal with COVID-19 that's, that's pretty incredible. So thank you so much for coming on. Uh, I really appreciate it. What's next? What's next? You tell me, man. I mean, this has been a great time to chat with you to sort of put a big plug for this platform for our teams. I think you're doing some great work here by spreading the good word out there. Hopefully people will get out of their comic sounding things. I don't know what that, what that word means, but it sounds like it in a cartoon and would say, yeah, so well, great. We'll look forward to hearing great things from you. I am talking to Christian Giro from now on. I'm going to call him power BI hero. We certainly want to use that as the title for this. That'd be too embarrassing. So as always, thank you for listening to Asher success. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 20:24

You've been listening to Azure success, the podcast buy and for Azure professionals, you can visit our website, asher-success.com for show notes, helpful links and other episodes, but also to leave your questions, comments, and suggestions. Thank you for listening.