One of the World's Most Amazing Humans, w/ Matt Allington

Matt Allington is a Power BI consultant, Trainer, Microsoft MVP, author, and a friend! Matt has worked for many years in the retail and CPG industries, has a very deep knowledge of Business Intelligence and Data Analytics, and currently owns a Power BI consultancy ExceleratorBI in Australia!  Here's the link to Matt's book-Supercharge Power BI: Power BI Is Better When You Learn to Write DAX

Episode Timeline:

• 2:00 - Did Matt and Tom the SQL Rockstar previously meet each other?
• 6:25 - Matt's origin story is an epic and relatable journey of discovery
• 14:00 - The importance of process (and we adopt Matt's superior pronunciation of the word)
• 25:35 - Business, Sales, and IT (and once again the importance of Hybrid roles)
• 29:10 - The evolution of BI tools, and the best and worst of the bunch
• 37:15 - Structure VS Flexibility in BI tools
• 48:55 - Power BI and Power Query enter the fray, Excel people get angry, and everyone has the same opinion of Power View
• 53:50- The friction Tom got from adding Business Analytics to conference menus, and the birth of BACon
• 1:08:45 - Matt's connection to Rob's broken leg
• 1:11:05 - Training remotely in the COVID world, and The Collie Layout Methodology
• 1:16:20 - Rob takes exception to Matt's math

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome back friends to Raw Data. Today's guest is Matt Allington. He comes to us from Down Under. Now, Matt has a very particularly validating story for me. I bet my career in 2010 on the future success of Power BI. I just knew it. I could see it. And even though I was convinced that this was of the future, in 2014, when I crossed paths with Matt Allington, something happened. It was still, even though I believe what I was doing, was still incredibly validating.

Rob Collie (00:00:30): This guy was a BI director for Coca-Cola, Asia Pacific BI director. As far as I was concerned, one of the sort of made men of the elite of the traditional industry. And after a brief interaction and exposure to what I've been working on, he called me up and said, "Hey, I want to go do what you're doing." And like I said, even though I had been so convinced of what I was doing and it was already working out, it was going great, it was still a really validating moment and just an incredibly exciting feelgood moment for me to see someone sort of cross over like he was doing.

Rob Collie (00:01:04): Now in today's podcast, you'll hear that he actually... If I'd known more about him at the time, it wouldn't have been quite as much of a surprise to me. So a lot of things that we talk about on today's pod are things that I was hearing for the first time. It was really interesting even to me, after knowing Matt for as long as I have. We had a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy it as well. So let's get after it.

Announcer (00:01:26): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:30): This is the Raw Data by P3 Podcast with your host, Rob Collie and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:49): Welcome to the show, Matt Allington. Sometimes we like to say the, the Matt Allington.

Matt Allington (00:01:55): Thank you. Great to be here.

Rob Collie (00:01:57): Matt, you were at at least one or two of the past business analytics conferences. Tom, had a lot to do with organizing those. Did you guys ever meet at one