SQLBits 2024

Lessons learned: Governance and Adoption for Power BI

In this session we will dive into serveral concepts of the Power BI governance and adoption roadmap. These concepts will then be explained further with practical examples / customer cases I encountered implementing various parts of the roadmap at customers.
Rolling out Power BI within an organization is not an easy job. There are usually two strategies: Decide on a governance and adoption strategy first and roll out Power BI accordingly, or make Power BI widely available and set up governance and adoption afterwards. Especially in the latter scenario, setting up a proper governance and adoption strategy might become a challenge. Users might resist new guidelines as they are used to their own way of work and feel neglected without any guidance on how to use Power BI. On top of that, there might widely used solutions in place which are violating the company regulations, leading to more resistance in changing and rearranging the way of work.

This session focuses on the (re)governance and (re)adoption of Power BI within an organization in which Power BI is already being (widely) used by users with limited governance and adoption. As there are multiple paths to success, we will focus on a few core concepts to take into account when walking one of these paths. These concepts include, but are not limited to:

- Practices: Clear and transparent guidance and control on what actions are permitted, why and how.
- Content ownership: Managing and owning the content in Power BI.
- Enablement: Empowering users to leverage Power BI for data driven decisions.
- Help and Support: Establishing a support system with training, various levels of support and community.

In this session we will combine these theoretical concepts with lessons I learned along the way of implementing these concepts at various projects.