Effectively Planning Your Power BI Governance Deployment

Power BI is a Microsoft tool that is both a Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, which enables data acquisition, data transformation and cleansing, modelling and visualization, and report creation.

Meanwhile, power bi governance is a set of actionable strategies that will help leverage data utilization to achieve your goals. Think of it as a short-term and long-term roadmap that outlines specific tasks in certain stages in your deployment of the Power BI tool.

Deploying Power BI takes a lot of planning. There are several challenges, critical decisions, and potential problems you will meet along the way. 

At the outset, you need to identify right away who are the potential users and how you can make sure they will optimize the use of this tool. 

Here are some ways to roll out your Power BI governance plan:

1. Create a dedicated team that will take charge of the exploratory or experimental reporting. In most cases, you are wading through unexplored territory here. The team will then come up with a scalable solution that can be adopted and integrated into the systems.
2. Start small. This idea means that you implement Power BI in one department and then roll it out to the other teams. However, this is only applicable to large enterprises. Smaller organizations can deploy the tool across the board.
3. Determine how to deploy. There are three ways to adopt Power BI such as Corporate BI, IT-Led Self-Service BI, and Business-Led BI. For the most part, the organizational structure determines how it is to be used.  
4. Identify users.  The users will influence your Power BI governance roadmap. You have the developers, who will use the tool in conjunction with SQL Server Reporting Services or other reporting tools. You also have the super users and power users, who vary in the degree of familiarization in the use of the tool. Finally, you have the consumers, who are typically referred to as business users. Their level of competence is just enough that they can perform their task effectively using Power BI.
5. Configure Power BI to match goals and uses. Now you know how the Power BI is meant to be utilized in the organization as the users are identified. You can then configure the features to match the needs of the organization. 

For instance, there are three ways to share the content in Power BI: 

• Workspaces — This allows you to share content with others in the group. The content you share can be read-only or editable. 
• Content packs — Dashboard reporting, data models, and transformation scripts can be shared through a single file. Other team members can add information or alter the reports. However, this could change the original content, which may be hard to sync again.
• Embedded — The IT team typically manages this, and nobody else is allowed to touch the content. This way is more appropriate for a Corporate BI-type of deployment.

Theoretically, for smaller organizations, they can fully implement Power BI within a month. Of course, larger enterprises need a lot more time than that because of the complexity of the task.