Selected slides from presentation regarding Power BI Governance and Development Best Practices. Presentation was held at MS BI & Power BI User Group Finland event 12.6.2018 at Microsoft Flux, Helsinki. Without the animations & hands-on demos the slides do not tell the whole story, but hopefully valuable to some nevertheless.

1. Power BI
Governance and
Development Best
Practices
MSBI User Group Finland 12.6.2018

2. What happens if we enable self-service BI to
a large organization without any governance?

4. Ok, a bit exaggerated ,
but these issues are typical
• Self-service possibilities are not made use of as users are unaware
what they can and can not do
• Current unefficient way of working continues
• Let’s spend another day copy/pasting Excels!
• Your service desk gets loads of support requests they don’t know
nothing about and which could be easily tackled with end user
guidance
• Technical problems such as
• Problems with automatic updates
• Report performance issues
• Gateway issues
• Access management / permissions related issues
???

5. Ok, a bit exaggerated ,
but these issues are typical
• Licencing confusions
• Problems with data quality. Users are seeing out of date reports etc.
• Reinventing the wheel over and over again. Users are unaware what reports
others are doing.
• Lack of trust to the platform
• “I’m afraid to put the financial figures there because I might mess it up. I’ll
share them with Excel / PDF / PowerPoint as an email attachment instead
just to be safe.”
• “Power BI is slow”
• “Mike said that you should not use Power BI because someone said
something somewhere and then the Tinker Bell came and said that…”

6. Example situation without governance
You lousy IT people! What did
you do? All our reports are
down and we need to prepare
for the monthly executive
board meeting
Big business boss
BI manager
We are not even aware
that you are using Power BI
in France for financial
reporting

7. With a bit of governance,
we enable huge benefits!
• Robust platform trusted by the end users and happily managed by the platform
owners
• As role of Power BI is clear and development practices known, users will
innovate solutions that would not otherwise happen
• Rapid reporting/analysis development speed
• True knowledge management is enabled
• Business users can contribute directly to reporting development
• A person who really knows the data and what they want and is able to
create the mockup version themselves, cuts the time from report planning
to deployment to a fraction
• Nothing gives Power BI platform owner more pleasure than a business
user who has created their first report themselves

8. Introducing Power BI Governance model
Governance model defines practices, procedures
and responsibilities which ensure efficient and
secure usage of Power BI platform

9. Microsoft Whitepapers provide you good generic information as a starting point.
But you need to map and apply them to your organization’s needs.

10. Governance model covers
• Vision of Power BI usage at company environment
• Strategic and operational governance policies
• Detailed governance practices
• Information Security, Information Architecture, Permission
Model, Access Management
• Naming conventions
• Data sources, Integrations, Gateways
• End-user support, training and instructions
• Licensing
• Monitoring, Auditing
• Client distributions, Mobile usage
• Development practices

17. Governance tools: Governance document
• Document that describes the governance
model framework without going too deep
into technical details
• Mandatory reading for all report
developers!

18. Governance tools
• Development practices document & tutorials
• Power BI administration documents
• Power BI Service settings
• On-premises gateway configurations
• Power BI Community
• Champion network
• Training
• Preconfigured Power BI
template
• Power BI Admin portal & Audit log
• Governance toolkit Power BI reports
• On-premises gateway monitoring tools

19. That sounds likealotof
stuff. Fortunately itdoesn’t
haveto be.
Let’s diveinto thedetails.

20. Role & Vision of Power BI utilization
“Microsoft Power BI is our key reporting tool
alongside Cognos and Excel
• Power BI is to be used for….
• Cognos is to used for... insert your excuse
regarding legacy systems, modernization costs
and lacking resources here
• Excel is good for…”
Provide users a clear comparison table

21. Strategic & operational governance framework
Sponsor
(Executive Sponsor)
Steering
(Business Owner, Head of BI
Development, Platform Owner…)
Operational
(Application Service Manager, Platform Owner, Product
Owner(s), Analytics Team, Analysts…)
Development
(Analytics Team, Analysts)
Adoption
(Product Owners, Analysts,
Champions)
Operations
(Application Service
Manager, Analysts,
Champions, End Users)

22. Governance roles – Examples
Role Role description Responsible
Executive Sponsor Executive sponsor is a management team member who
represents business and is focal point of Business Intelligence /
Reporting / Analytics solutions at the company. Executive sponsor
is actively consulted about Power BI platform critical decisions.
Power BI Platform Owner /
Application Service Manager
Holds overall responsibility of Power BI environment. Acts in a
steering role and makes sure that development is aligned with
business objectives. Responsible for collecting input from different
aspects of business.
Owns Power BI Governance and Power BI Administration
documents and makes sure that Power BI follows official support
model and agreed SLAs.
Office 365 platform owner Holds overall responsibility of global Office 365 system as a
platform for communication, collaboration, and business app
services.
Reporting Product Owner(s) Gather business requirements and prioritize development
initiatives and facilitate continues improvement of Power BI
reporting.
IT infrastructure responsibles Responsible for the on-premises infrastructure for Power BI
(On-premises gateway, servers & connections, monitoring)

23. Governance roles – Examples
Role Role description Responsible
Analysts or
Analytics Team
Official report developers who might have certain responsibility area
(e.g. sales, finance, R&D)
Champions First point of contact for End Users when it comes to incidents and training.
They might also produce own reports that are not shared among all users
(self-service reporting).
End users - Users who do not create or edit reports, they purely view and read
reports and give input to Analytics team (in case of error or
improvement idea).
- Users who create reports using self-service reporting principles for
themselves or share them with colleagues from their personal Power
BI App Workspace.
There are typically also other company specific additional roles and stakeholders;
Security officer, risk management, internal audit, Azure Platform Owner…

24. Official and self-service reports - Example
Official reports Self-service reports
• Creation and maintenance by a
named analyst or analyst team
(visible on the info page of the
reports)
• Reports are published into a
workspace and shared to end users
as an App.
• Reports are licenced using Premium
licencing model which is activated
by IT after validating that practices
described in development practices
document have been used
• Anyone can create
• Can be shared to other users only from
personal Workspace (“My Workspace”)
but not via App Workspace.
• In order to access reports shared from
a personal workspace, user needs to
have Power BI Pro licence. Personal
workspaces can be allocated to
Premium model only on special
occasions. If you need end users who
are not Pro licenced to access your
report, create it based on the Official
report guidelines.

25. Data Sources – Provide a list of the typical data
sources, links to examples how to use them
Data source Description
Excel, CSV and other text files Any text based file on local computer or network drive
SharePoint, OneDrive Files and folders hosted in SharePoint or OneDrive, SharePoint lists
Office 365 Various services and APIs
Microsoft Azure Cloud Azure AD and other Azure Services such as Azure SQL
Web Almost any content can be loaded to reports from public websites and sometimes
from authenticated sites as well
Databases Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access and others
Web/application APIs Power BI supports multiple protocols such as JSON and XML
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-data-sources/

26. Share knowledge what company data resources
are available
Data source Description Dataset owner Instructions (how
to get access &
development
model)
EDW
(Enterprise
Data
Warehouse)
DataMarts currently
available:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Financials
- Projects
EDW team led by
john.doe@domain.com
Link
Dynamics 365
Sales
Dynamics Reporting
Database
Dynamics 365 Platform
Owner
john.doe@domain.com
Link
SAP BW Production and Test Head of reporting
john.doe@domain.com
Link
SAP BPC
….
Remember
Azure Data
Catalog!

27. Support model
• Service desk
• Licencing requests
• Access requests
• Power BI Desktop installations and updates
• Link user to correct document & tutorial in Power BI Community
• Power BI Community
• Typically a SharePoint site
• Company specific Power BI related information in a single place
• Documentation and tutorials
• List of all official reports
• FAQ
• Peer support channel via Yammer or Teams
• Champion network
• Peer support from named colleagues that get additional training
and help others
• Typically analysts

28. Data classifications according to company policy
Sync with security officer and provide descriptions
for categories!

29. Information security & permission model
IAM – Identity & Access Management
• Reports are nowadays mainly shared and consumed as apps
• You can grant permissions to individuals, AD groups and distribution lists, but not
Office 365 groups
• Internal user identities vs. external users?
• E.g. partner users are saved in own OU vs. requirement to use guest account
(Azure AD B2B)
• What is the current policy regarding AD groups
• AD groups are mastered in on-premises AD?
• Self service management enabled via FIM/MIM or other IAM solution?
• Management done via named persons?
• Management done via service desk requests?
• Self service group management is enabled only for Azure AD groups?
• Will not sync to on-prem (writeback can be enabled for Office 365 Groups)
• Possibility to use dynamic groups based on AD / HR data?
• Office 365 groups policy?

30. Permission levels
• App level permissions
• Workspace level permissions
• Owner
• Member (edit or read)
• Report & dashboard sharing
• Row level security
• Dynamic or role based
• Permissions maintained in source system
• DirectQuery data sources (note! SAP BW / Hana support available)
• Live connections (Analysis Services)

31. Access management becomes a mess
if you don’t plan it properly and guide
the analysts

32. Licencing
• Provide clear instructions for end users what can be done with free licence
and when you need Pro
• Even after reading Microsoft tutorials, most users seem to think that you
need licence to use Power BI Desktop
• Business is unable to plan new reporting / analytics implementations if they
are unable to calculate the TCO.
• If you using Power BI Premium, clearly inform which users need Pro and that
otherwise end user licencing is covered automatically, including external
users

33. Development practices
• Provide a preconfigured Power BI template
• Info page
• Color theme
• Calendar table
• Request analysts to fill in a report knowledge sheet
• Can be e.g. a Word document or a form in a
more formal system where report metadata is
collected
• Information regarding the report purpose, end
users and data sources
• Provide tutorials, training and links in Power BI Community
• ETL Best Practices
• DAX Best Practices. Examples:
• https://www.sqlbi.com/tv/dax-best-practices-sqlbits-2018/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/power-bi-reports-performance
• Support usage of development tools
• Tabular editor, DAX Studio, Vertipaq Analyzer, SQL profiler…

34. Development practices
• Scheduled updates (especially when using Premium capacity)
• Recommended not to update reports from source systems more often than
source system data is updated
• Disabled unnecessary updates from dev & test
• For unused reports automatically disabled after 90 days
• Usage of Azure Virtual Machines for development
• Really good benefit-cost ratio, remember autoshutdown
• Having your BI VM in same data center as Power BI Service & SharePoint has
major benefits regarding network speed (deployments & version control)
• Version control
• Provide instructions how to do file based version control properly
• Dev/Test/Prod
• Using SharePoint as a PBIX file storage
• Storing PBIT files to VSTS or similar

35. Development practices
• Workspace creation policy
• Prod
• Dev/Test (Selective Apps publishing for test)
OR
- Dev
- Test
- Prod
• Workspace naming convention example:
• PBI Marketing
• PBI Marketing – Dev/Test
Group to be used
with Power BI
Company division or
function. Provide a list.

36. Client distributions
• Keeping your report developers happy means providing them
up-to-date Power BI Desktop version!
• For Windows 10 users, support installation & updates from Store
• Earlier Windows versions: Try to support regular updates via SCCM if
users lack local admin permissions.
• Otherwise, plan to support regular updates to be done by the service
desk or provide other method for users to get their updates easily.

37. Monitoring & auditing
• Power BI Admin Portal
• Unified audit log
• Power BI APIs
• Gateways should be monitored for CPU & memory usage and errors in
event log
• Dataset update failure notifications are sent to user who configured the
dataset
• For the time being centralized monitoring requires monitoring
credentials to be added to each workspace => Alerts triggered via API
monitoring

38. Demo of Governance
toolkit reports

39. Thank you!
Digital Illustrated
Salomonkatu 1
00100 Helsinki
Jouko Nyholm
Consultant
jouko.nyholm@digitalillustrated.com
+358 40 722 4481
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joukonyholm
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