Ninth Blog Birthday

This is the ninth anniversary of the first post on my blog, and every year at this time I take a moment to reflect on what’s happened in the last twelve months in my professional life and in the world of Microsoft BI.

Without a doubt 2013 has been the year of Power BI. It’s true we’ve had PowerPivot Power Pivot for a while now, but in my opinion the combination of Excel 2013, Power Query, Power Map, Power BI Sites and Q&A is a much stronger proposition for customers interested in self-service BI; I’ve already blogged at great length about what I think are the strengths and weaknesses of Power BI (see here, here and here) so I won’t repeat myself here. As you would expect Microsoft marketing has gone into overdrive to promote it (have you entered the Power BI competition yet?) and it will be in 2014 that we see whether Power BI is a success or not. What will success look like though, if it comes? It won’t be lots of customers lining up to buy Power BI in they way they’ve bought traditional BI solutions, I think: instead it will be organisations that have already signed up for Office 365 being upsold to Power BI based on their existing commitment to the Office platform. This presents a number of challenges to someone like me who makes a living as an independent consultant and trainer.

At the moment more than 90% of my consultancy income comes from SSAS and MDX, but the overall percentage of my time that I spend doing consultancy has reduced over the last few years to about 60%. This is partly the result of SSAS and MDX skills becoming more widespread; partly due to the fact that I’ve been promoting my public and private training more aggressively; and possibly due to fewer new SSAS projects kicking off. In the future I expect this trend to continue. Just how much consultancy will be necessary in the world of self-service Power BI solutions remains to be seen, but it’s going to be less than is necessary for corporate SSAS solutions and the rates will probably be lower too.

For the same reason, though, the demand for all forms of training for Power BI will almost certainly be much greater. That’s why I’ve been scheduling more public training courses through Technitrain; why I’ve signed up to write a book on Power Query next year; and why I’ve started recording video training courses with Project Botticelli (there’s a new video available there, by the way, on set and member functions). If I’m honest I prefer doing consultancy to training and I don’t think you can be a really good trainer if you don’t have a substantial amount of practical experience gained from consultancy, so I’m going to have to make a special effort to maintain a balance between the two.

Speaking at conferences and user groups is an aspect of my work that I’ve always really enjoyed, and I’m pleased to say that I’ll be speaking at the PASS BA Conference next year for example. I’m also still involved with SQLBits but please, please don’t ask me when the next SQLBits will be – we don’t have anything to announce yet but I can assure you we are working on it and I promise there will be one in 2014. I won’t be speaking at quite so many events as I have done in the past however. I travel a lot for work and this makes it hard to justify spending even more time away from my family, especially at weekends, so I’ve made a conscious decision to cut down on my speaking engagements. The thing is that the number of SQL Server events has increased a lot in the last couple of years and this has led to an increased number of invitations to speak, and I’m one of those people who finds it hard to say no when someone asks me to do something. I’m just going to have to be a bit more choosy from now on, and concentrate on events close to home, events that coincide with business trips and online sessions.

All that remains is to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2014, and to thank you for reading my blog! This time next year I’ll have been blogging for ten years, and that’s a scary thought…