Power BI projects fail when IT and business teams push in different directions. The good news? There’s a smarter way to align them. In this article, we show why business-led Power BI prototyping is the missing link that accelerates adoption, reduces frustration, and drives better reporting outcomes.
In today’s corporate environment, specialists from IS/IT and business units often have different perspectives on how to build and manage internal reporting. Both sides share the same ultimate goal: a reliable and sustainable solution that everyone can trust. However, their priorities differ.
IT vs. Business Preferences
The technical world favors a strictly governed, highly structured, and secure approach — built on fixed pipelines and accepting slower delivery. Meanwhile, business teams prefer quick wins, even if that means tolerating minor inaccuracies or temporary workarounds. While IT operates in a deterministic world of zeros and ones, business leaders often need to make decisions based on 90% confidence rather than making no decision at all.
In the first part of this series, we highlighted the strength of Microsoft Power BI in enabling organizations to make better business decisions. We emphasized starting with business value for management and engaging report authors before enforcing software engineering rules. This time, we’ll explore why allowing business teams to lead initial reporting efforts can also benefit IS/IT colleagues.
The Common Pitfall: Treating Report Creation as a Software Development Process
In many reporting solution implementations, the pattern is familiar: Business teams express their needs → IS/IT builds the solution → testing follows → finally, the reports are deployed for business consumption and decision-making.
On paper, this sounds reasonable — especially back when reporting tools were complex and required deep technical expertise to deliver results. But reality often tells a different story, full of delays, frustration, and missed opportunities.
Here’s what typically happens:
- Data Integration Challenges
Not all data is fully integrated or clean. To achieve this, organizations often launch lengthy and costly processes to structure, unify, model, version, document, monitor, audit, protect, and back up the data (and you could add even more adjectives).
Result: The business waits. - Unclear Reporting Requirements
Defining the exact picture of the expected report is not easy. Business requirements often evolve, leading to endless iterations and a ping-pong of changes.
Result: Both sides grow frustrated. - Temporary Workarounds
As time passes, business teams create their own temporary solutions — which, surprisingly, work well enough for now.
Result: Business attention shifts away, and IS/IT frustration grows. - Loss of Urgency
The originally urgent topic loses momentum. Awareness fades, priorities shift, and engagement drops.
Result: Business loses interest, IS/IT loses patience.
Finally, the report is delivered and deployed — but nobody cares anymore. So much effort spent, and no champagne to celebrate.
Let the Business Build the House
With modern reporting platforms, deep technical skills are no longer required to create a functional reporting solution. Think of it as building a house: it may not include cutting-edge features like solar panels, water retention systems, or smart home integrations, but it will provide the essentials — shelter, fresh water, a place to cook, and even a television for comfort.
At the early stage of any reporting initiative, a prototype is essential. With Microsoft Power BI, business users are often the best developers for these prototypes. Let them bring their ideas to life and validate their solutions against real expectations.
This approach will result in dozens — perhaps hundreds — of small “houses” across different business areas. They may not meet every modern engineering standard, but not all of them need to last a century.
Most reporting needs do not require full compliance with every quality engineering criterion. Over time, usage patterns will reveal which reports are worth standardizing and investing in with additional technical resources.
Conclusion
Companies should view Power BI as the natural evolution of MS Excel — a tool that has long been a cornerstone of business reporting. Many organizations still rely on MS Excel for critical reporting. Introducing a more robust platform like Power BI can only strengthen reporting capabilities, increasing the potential for standardized, governed, and trustworthy processes — even without strict governance or complex software development rules.
When IS/IT departments recognize that business-led report creation is essentially prototyping, and allow time for this evolution to reveal where deeper investment is needed, the entire organization benefits. This approach saves time and energy, reducing unnecessary activities often caused by misunderstandings or the “different language” spoken by business and IT teams.
Unlock Power BI’s Full Potential
At Profinit, we help companies adopt Power BI in a way that maximizes value from day one. Our approach ensures quick wins, strong business engagement, and a smooth path to long-term scalability.
Here’s how we support your reporting modernization:
- Identify key concepts based on your company’s business and/or conceptual model to focus on what matters most.
- Select the right reports to build first. Those with high added value and manageable complexity.
- Develop those reports efficiently, prioritizing quick delivery while maintaining essential development standards that support future scalability and standardization.
- Educate your report users on how to work effectively with Power BI reports.
- Train your report authors to build efficient data models tailored to their reporting needs.
- Guide your report authors in designing intuitive and impactful report pages for their audience.
Ready to transform your reporting with Power BI? Contact us and let me or my colleagues help you deliver immediate value while building a scalable reporting foundation for the future.