Overview
In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick Thompson and Caleb Wilkes address a challenge that follows every successful BI build: getting people to actually use what was built. The conversation is practical and specific, covering four delivery strategies that extend the reach of BI reports beyond the users who actively seek them out to the broader audience whose engagement with data would change how the organization operates.
For any data team that has built quality reports and found that adoption is lower than the quality of the work would suggest it should be, this episode provides the tactical toolkit for closing that gap. See how Blue Margin’s Managed Analytics & Insights builds adoption strategy into every engagement so that the reports delivered actually reach and influence the people they were built for.
What This Episode Covers
Office Display Screens (1:04 – 2:48)
Placing screens in high-traffic office areas that rotate through key reports keeps data visible to employees who might not seek it out independently. Break rooms, common areas, and hallways create passive exposure that builds familiarity with the metrics and normalizes the practice of checking data as part of the daily work environment. The hosts suggest taking this further with touch-screen overlays that make the displays interactive, allowing employees to engage with the data in the moment rather than simply passing by it.
Mobile Accessibility (2:50 – 4:22)
The Power BI mobile app extends report access to employees who are traveling, working remotely, or simply away from their desks when they need to check a metric. The hosts recommend building mobile-optimized versions of key reports specifically for smaller screens rather than assuming the desktop version will translate well. A report that is difficult to read on a phone does not get read on a phone, and the investment in a mobile-optimized version produces meaningfully higher engagement from users who spend significant time away from their desks.
Automated Email Subscriptions (4:23 – 6:37)
Setting up automatic report subscriptions delivers data snapshots directly to employees’ inboxes on a defined schedule, creating a regular and habitual reminder to review key metrics without requiring users to remember to log in. The hosts note a secondary benefit: the accumulated snapshots function as an informal archive of data trends over time, which is useful for users who want to track how metrics have moved without navigating historical data in the reporting tool directly.
Embedding Reports in Intranets (6:38 – 8:37)
Integrating reports directly into the company portals and collaboration tools where employees already spend their time, platforms like SharePoint or Microsoft Teams, places data in the workflow rather than requiring a separate navigation step to reach it. When the report lives in the same environment where employees manage benefits, submit time off, or collaborate on projects, the barrier to checking it drops to nearly zero. Proximity to where work actually happens is one of the most effective drivers of consistent usage.
Who It’s For
This episode is worth your time if you are a BI developer or data team lead who has delivered high-quality reports and is trying to understand why adoption is not matching the quality of the work, a business leader or change management professional responsible for driving behavioral adoption of new data tools across an organization, an IT or operations team evaluating how to integrate Power BI reports into the existing digital workspace in ways that reduce friction for end users, or any organization that has made a significant BI investment and wants to ensure that investment reaches the full population of users who could benefit from it rather than just the ones who actively seek it out.
Why It’s Worth a Listen
The adoption challenge is one of the most consistent gaps between what BI projects deliver technically and what they produce organizationally. This episode is useful precisely because it is tactical rather than strategic, offering four specific mechanisms that can be implemented relatively quickly and that address adoption from different angles: ambient visibility, mobile access, push delivery, and workflow integration. Organizations that combine multiple approaches tend to see significantly higher engagement than those that rely on a single channel.
The mobile optimization recommendation is worth taking seriously as a distinct design task rather than an afterthought. The assumption that a well-designed desktop report will be readable on a phone is almost always wrong, and the users who try to check a mobile report that is not optimized for mobile tend not to try again. A modest investment in a mobile-specific layout for the most frequently used reports produces a disproportionate return in engagement from a user population that is increasingly mobile in how it works.
And the intranet embedding point is the most strategically important of the four for organizations that have a SharePoint or Teams environment that employees use daily. Data that lives where work happens gets consulted when decisions are being made. Data that requires a separate login and navigation step gets consulted when someone specifically sets out to look at it, which is a much smaller and less frequent population of interactions. Closing that distance is one of the highest-leverage changes an organization can make to how frequently its data actually influences the decisions it was built to inform.
