How to approach solution development

Power BI models and DAX enable a different way to develop BI solutions with much deeper involvement from businesspeople. This leads to solutions that deliver insights that optimally add value to the business.

The traditional, IT-centric way to create BI solutions is to start with connecting to data sources and preparing data. At first glance, this sounds like the right thing to do; after all, we need good data to have good and valuable insights.

Figure 1.6: The traditional BI solution development approach

This approach is typically materialized in the development of an enterprise data warehouse. The idea behind having a data warehouse is to store all of the organization's data in a single place, and to use that as the foundation for all reporting.

It should be clear that this can be a major undertaking, as organizations have many different systems, with lots of different data in them. The data warehouse is traditionally...