Is Microsoft Fabric the data solution for charities? | by Rachel Wooldridge

Working at a charity where funds are always limited, I got very excited when I first heard about Fabric. I thought it was going to be the answer to all my data issues, but is it as good as it sounds??

What is Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric was made “Generally Available” in November 2023 although it will be some time before all intended features are fully available. See the official Microsoft blog update for more technical info! 

The Official Microsoft Description is:

“Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place. With Fabric, you don't need to piece together different services from multiple vendors. Instead, you can enjoy a highly integrated, end-to-end, and easy-to-use product that is designed to simplify your analytics needs.”

What is Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

……and they have a diagram that you will see in almost every presentation on Microsoft Fabric:

What does this mean in layman's terms? Thinking from a charity perspective it could be that data from two or more internal databases plus an external government dataset are pulled and stored together in one place in a standardised format (that’s the “data lake” bit!). 

Then there are a variety of tools (that line of 6 icons at the top) that can be used to work with the different data sets that are now in the “lake”.  The tools included with Fabric can be used to transform the data (meaning to clean, standardise and structure it) and then analyse the data to create insights and reports that can support charities to make data-driven decisions. 
Below is my attempt at simplifying this into an image:
 

One of the big points that Microsoft are keen to make is that:

“The platform is built on a foundation of Software as a Service (SaaS), which takes simplicity and integration to a whole new level."
 

What is Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Reviewers, who have used some of the tools in their stand-alone formats, seem to agree Microsoft have done a great job of simplifying them and making the process of using them much more user-friendly. People are talking about Fabric as being for “Citizen Developers” (people with little to no experience when it comes to coding, IT, or computer science, but who build applications with approved tools) to use, empowering a whole new group of people to gain insights from data. This is where charities in particular could benefit. 

Charities often have limited funding and as a result, smaller teams of people, and in some cases, nobody at all working solely with their data. In my experience, particularly in smaller charities, real insights from data either don’t feature, because there is nobody on the team who feels confident or has the skills to analyse their data. Or insights are pulled together by people in operational roles, who can’t do much more than pull basic stats together because they simply don’t have the time even when they recognise the value of the data. Having a powerful tool like Fabric could help these teams to do more with what they have.

Weighing up the pros and cons

Having said all of that there are drawbacks to a Citizen Developer approach. Data can be manipulated and distorted, we see this in politics with people on both sides of an argument cutting and filtering the same data in different ways to fit their argument. But this isn’t always done maliciously, sometimes not knowing the fundamentals around cleaning, processing, and presenting data can lead to innocent mistakes. Even Charities that recognise the value of data and want to prioritise it, often struggle to provide access to training. I only got the opportunity through a charity partnership relationship leading to a free place on an apprenticeship with Multiverse. 

I can see the benefits of Fabric giving me the ability to create an end-to-end process for our data, but I would probably still need quite a bit of support from our organisation’s IT team to all parts set up in a way I was confident was correct. This is support that is not always available for smaller charities and learning about best practices for all the different aspects of data work is not a quick journey. 

Fabric is not free…. Well, it is for now while it is still in preview mode so you can test it out, but it will require a licence when it is fully launched. It is pitched as being a cheaper option than buying all the different tools separately and there is a calculator to work out what the costs would be. However, this calculator requires a fair bit of, what I would class as, IT knowledge and I have struggled to feel confident about what a price may be. What if you only want to use a couple of the tools then, is it still cheaper than buying the standalone versions?

The pricing is flexible, allowing charities to choose a level that suits them and their needs and there are options to scale the capacity automatically as and when it is needed so that you only pay for what you use. However, I have not been able to find publicly available information on what the charity discount price or offer (assuming there will be one based on other Microsoft products) might be. There is now an option to request a quote, so if a charity has information on the size of their data they may be able to get information this way. 
 

To sum up

So whilst Fabric provides the opportunity for Charities to take ownership of their data and maximise the insights they can gain from it to drive data-led decision-making, smaller charities might not have the people power (time and skills) to take advantage of this.

For charities that have or can commit to the skills and capacity needed, there could be huge benefits in bringing together data from multiple projects, and external data and being able to combine this to extract complex insights could change the way work is planned and delivered for the better, which could in turn bring efficiencies elsewhere. 

So the biggest questions I think charities need to ask when considering using Fabric is… 

Can our people do it all? Do they have the knowledge and skills and if not can we spare the time to learn them?
 

Rachel Wooldridge is an Advanced Data Fellowship apprentice at Multiverse based in Birmingham, UK, and is writing for the Apprentice Lens. Here’s more about her:

'I'm Rachel, Data Manager at Food for Life which is part of the Soil Association. I'm new to data as a full-time career and want to try blogging as a way of sharing my data journey experiences as well as building some new skills. When I'm not buried in PowerBi or getting excited about Power Automate I  am happiest being creative... usually getting messy and creating something far bigger than I planned!'