Metrics and Scorecards · Learn Microsoft Fabric

Metrics and Scorecards

Hi Everyone. Let me know if this has been asked and answered somewhere else. I wanted to get your thoughts on organizational metrics. Specifically:

Has anyone tried out the new Metrics feature in Fabric?
If so, what are your initial thoughts on useability and organizational readiness?
Outside of this, how else do you manage Metrics and organizational KPIs?

Here is some background

My team are building a catalogue of enterprise reports covering everything from sales to supply chain.
Each report has 1 - 5 metrics that are clearly shown and that 'anchor' the report to the overall organizational performance framework
Each metric should ideally display its current state, trend and variance to target. We are working on the data modelling to get the right level of history to make this happen so not every metric has this right now... but that is the plan
The holy grail has always been to have a high-level scorecard that displays all the metrics in a condensed format for management to fly over, flag as needed and drill through to the underlying report to answer any follow-on questions
In previous businesses and in the early days of Power BI we used dashboards and 'reports of reports' to try solve this. They key is ensuring there is auditability and the numbers match. The data modelling using direct query to the semantic models can get pretty ugly, especially if you are working with models powering many reports. We have also tried hanging a metric report off to the side by building specific metric tables in Azure. The challenge here is that depending on your pipeline refresh schedule, the numbers may be off from the underlying reports. There is also the technical overhead of maintaining metric logic in two places
My team have also tried setting up scorecards. Since they were released, they have shown great promise. They have the auditability nailed. The trend is more complicated since they rely on hard snapshots in the Power BI service. This makes them vulnerable to exchange rate adjustments and if you want to change a metric definition you cannot 'back map' the historical data. I also feel they are better suited for limited focus management of specific organizational problems where time is short and the business team does not have the luxury of waiting for a full data model to be developed. Trying to get scorecards to scale across many business units, functions etc. can be daunting. Even with the newer 'hierarchies' feature in place. Finally, the scorecard subscription service here is visually a dud😆. It's just not something that an executive will engage with.
You can get over that last point by a bit of hack, which is to build a report of scorecards. This is visually more appealing and you can set the subscription up as usual. However, this does create a BI 'click through' rabbit hole
Fabric metrics shows some promise and so I am interested how others have solved this challenge