Microsoft Fabric adoption roadmap: Business alignment

Note

This article forms part of the Microsoft Fabric adoption roadmap series of articles. For an overview of the series, see Microsoft Fabric adoption roadmap.

Business intelligence (BI) activities and solutions have the best potential to deliver value when they're well aligned to organizational business goals. In general, effective business alignment helps to improve adoption. With effective business alignment, the data culture and data strategy enable business users to achieve their business objectives.

You can achieve effective business alignment with data activities and solutions by having:

• An understanding of the strategic importance of data and analytics in achieving measurable progress toward business goals.
• A shared awareness of the business strategy and key business objectives among content owners, creators, consumers, and administrators. A common understanding should be integral to the data culture and decision-making across the organization.
• A clear and unified understanding of the business data needs, and how meeting these needs helps content creators and content consumers achieve their objectives.
• A governance strategy that effectively balances user enablement with risk mitigation.
• An engaged executive sponsor who provides top-down guidance to regularly promote, motivate, and support the data strategy and related activities and solutions.
• Productive and solution-oriented discussions between business teams and technical teams that address business data needs and problems.
• Effective and flexible requirements gathering processes to design and plan solutions.
• Structured and consistent processes to validate, deploy, and support solutions.
• Structured and sustainable processes to regularly update existing solutions so that they remain relevant and valuable, despite changes in technology or business objectives.

Effective business alignment brings significant benefits to an organization. Here are some benefits of effective business alignment.

• Improved adoption, because content consumers are more likely to use solutions that enable them to achieve their objectives.
• Increased business return on investment (ROI) for analytics initiatives and solutions, because these initiatives and solutions will be more likely to directly advance progress toward business goals.
• Less effort and fewer resources spent on change management and changing business requirements, due to an improved understanding of business data needs.

Achieve business alignment

There are multiple ways to achieve business alignment of data activities and initiatives.

Communication alignment

Effective and consistent communication is critical to aligning processes. Consider the following actions and activities when you want to improve communication for successful business alignment.

• Make and follow a plan for central teams and the user community to follow.
• Plan regular alignment meetings between different teams and groups. For example, central teams can plan regular planning and priority alignments with business units. Another example is when central teams schedule regular meetings to mentor and enable self-service users.
• Set up a centralized portal to consolidate communication and documentation for user communities. For strategic solutions and initiatives, consider using a communication hub.
• Limit complex business and technical terminology in cross-functional communications.
• Strive for concise communication and documentation that's formatted and well organized. That way, people can easily find the information that they need.
• Consider maintaining a visible roadmap that shows the planned solutions and activities relevant to the user community in the next quarter.
• Be transparent when communicating policies, decisions, and changes.
• Create a process for people to provide feedback, and review that feedback regularly as part of regular planning activities.

Important

To achieve effective business alignment, you should make it a priority to identify and dismantle any communication barriers between business teams and technical teams.

Strategic alignment

Your business strategy should be well aligned with your data and BI strategy. To incrementally achieve this alignment, we recommend that you commit to following structured, iterative planning processes.

• Strategic planning: Define data, analytics, and BI goals and priorities based on the business strategy and current state of adoption and implementation. Typically, strategic planning occurs every 12-18 months to iteratively define high-level desired outcomes. You should synchronize strategic planning with key business planning processes.
• Tactical planning: Define objectives, action plans, and a backlog of solutions that help you to achieve your data and BI goals. Typically, tactical planning occurs quarterly to iteratively re-evaluate and align the data strategy and activities to the business strategy. This alignment is informed by business feedback and changes to business objectives or technology. You should synchronize tactical planning with key project planning processes.
• Solution planning: Design, develop, test, and deploy solutions that support content creators and consumers in achieving their business objectives. Both centralized content creators and self-service content creators conduct solution planning to ensure that the solutions they create are well aligned with business objectives. You should synchronize solution planning with key adoption and governance planning processes.

Important

Effective business alignment is a key prerequisite for a successful data strategy.

Governance and compliance alignment

A key aspect of effective business alignment is balancing user enablement and risk mitigation. This balance is an important aspect of your governance strategy, together with other activities related to compliance, security and privacy, that can include:

• Transparently document and justify compliance criteria, key governance decisions, and policies so that content creators and consumers know what's expected of them.
• Regularly audit and assess activities to identify risk areas or strong deviations from the desired behaviors.
• Provide mechanisms for content owners, content creators, and content consumers to request clarification or provide feedback about existing policies.

Caution

A governance strategy that's poorly aligned with business objectives can result in more conflicts and compliance risk, because users will often pursue workarounds to complete their tasks.

Executive alignment

Executive leadership plays a key role in defining the business strategy and business goals. To this end, executive engagement is an important part of achieving top-down business alignment.

To achieve executive alignment, consider the following key considerations and activities.

• Work with your executive sponsor to organize short, quarterly executive feedback sessions about the use of data in the organization. Use this feedback to identify changes in business objectives, re-assess the data strategy, and inform future actions to improve business alignment.
• Schedule regular alignment meetings with the executive sponsor to promptly identify any potential changes in the business strategy or data needs.
• Deliver monthly executive summaries that highlight relevant information, including:
  • Key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure progress toward data, analytics, and BI goals.
  • Fabric adoption and implementation milestones.
  • Technology changes that might impact organizational business goals.

Important

Don't underestimate the importance of the role your executive sponsor has in achieving and maintaining effective business alignment.

Maintain business alignment

Business alignment is a continual process. To maintain business alignment, consider the following factors.

• Assign a responsible team: A working team reviews feedback and organizes re-alignment sessions. This team is responsible for the alignment of planning and priorities between the business and data strategy.
• Create and support a feedback process: Your user community requires the means to provide feedback. Examples of feedback can include requests to change existing solutions, or to create new solutions and initiatives. This feedback is essential for bottom-up business user alignment, and it drives iterative and continuous improvement cycles.
• Measure the success of business alignment: Consider using surveys, sentiment analysis, and usage metrics to assess the success of business alignment. When combined with other concise feedback mechanisms, this can provide valuable input to help define future actions and activities to improve business alignment and Fabric adoption.
• Schedule regular re-alignment sessions: Ensure that data strategic planning and tactical planning occur alongside relevant business strategy planning (when business leadership review business goals and objectives).

Note

Because business objectives continually evolve, you should understand that solutions and initiatives will change over time. Don't assume that requirements for data and BI projects are rigid and can't be altered. If you struggle with changing requirements, it might be an indication that your requirements-gathering process is ineffective or inflexible, or that your development workflows don't sufficiently incorporate regular feedback.

Important

To effectively maintain business alignment, it's essential that user feedback be promptly and directly addressed. Regularly review and analyze feedback, and consider how you can integrate it into iterative strategic planning, tactical planning, and solution planning processes.

Questions to ask

Use questions like those found below to assess business alignment.

• Can people articulate the goals of the organization and the business objectives of their team?
• To what extent do descriptions of organizational goals align across the organization? How do they align between the business user community and leadership community? How do they align between business teams and technical teams?
• Does executive leadership understand the strategic importance of data in achieving business objectives? Does the user community understand the strategic importance of data in helping them succeed in their jobs?
• Are changes in the business strategy reflected promptly in changes to the data strategy?
• Are changes in business user data needs addressed promptly in data and BI solutions?
• To what extent do data policies support or conflict with existing business processes and the way that users work?
• Do solution requirements focus more on technical features than addressing business questions? Is there a structured requirements gathering process? Do content owners and creators interact effectively with stakeholders and content consumers during requirements gathering?
• How are decisions about data or BI investments made? Who makes these decisions?
• How well do people trust existing data and BI solutions? Is there a single version of truth, or are there regular debates about who has the correct version?
• How are data and BI initiatives and strategy communicated across the organization?

Maturity levels

A business alignment assessment evaluates integration between the business strategy and data strategy. Specifically, this assessment focuses on whether or not data and BI initiatives and solutions support business users to achieve business strategic objectives.

The following maturity levels will help you assess your current state of business alignment.

Level	State of data and business alignment
100: Initial	• Business and data strategies lack formal alignment, which leads to reactive implementation and misalignment between data teams and business users. • Misalignment in priorities and planning hinders productive discussions and effectiveness. • Executive leadership doesn't recognize data as a strategic asset.
200: Repeatable	• There are efforts to align data and BI initiatives with specific data needs without a consistent approach or understanding of their success. • Alignment discussions focus on immediate or urgent needs and focus on features, solutions, tools or data, rather than strategic alignment. • People have a limited understanding of the strategic importance of data in achieving business objectives.
300: Defined	• Data and BI initiatives are prioritized based on their alignment with strategic business objectives. However, alignment is siloed and typically focuses on local needs. • Strategic initiatives and changes have a clear, structured involvement of both the business and data strategic decision makers. Business teams and technical teams can have productive discussions to meet business and governance needs.
400: Capable	• There's a consistent, organization-wide view of how data initiatives and solutions support business objectives. • Regular and iterative strategic alignments occur between the business and technical teams. Changes to the business strategy result in clear actions that are reflected by changes to the data strategy to better support business needs. • Business and technical teams have healthy, productive relationships.
500: Efficient	• The data strategy and the business strategy are fully integrated. Continuous improvement processes drive consistent alignment, and they are themselves data driven. • Business and technical teams have healthy, productive relationships.

Related content

In the next article in the Microsoft Fabric adoption roadmap series, learn more about content ownership and management, and its effect on business-led self-service BI, managed self-service BI, and enterprise BI.