Discussion - Should BI Fall Under the Development Team?

kentyler 

Would all the potential requests/needs for BI work go through the dev manager ?  Would they all be about the web ?

Or would there be multiple "customers" for the results of working with BI and would a person who could answer for all the BI resources be a better gateway to have them go through.

No, seperate project boards and seperate requests. Probably the latter.

It sounds like you have a dev (web) manager now, and want to use them to handle this new sphere of activity.

If there are other internal customers they could eventually end up being a choke point.

The other question would be is does the dev manager understand enough about BI to manage the BI resources ? 

No they are purely web dev, but very competent, reliable, proven, and trusted within dev, IT, and the company. For the most part, BI runs independently.

So the thing to understand is that where I am for decades there has always just been dev and infrastructure. BI is a completely new concept and with the few reports we have out there it's catching on fast. So very early on there is a demand for more projects and resources to be dedicate towards this against the current constantly expanding backlog. The only person with experience and allocated towards BI has worked here for a couple months and that's when Power BI work started so despite the current rapid success, recognition, expertise, and vision they haven't been here long enough and there probably isn't enough of a proven track record at least that's my guess. So is it better to entrust such an import platform to someone that recently started but has expertise or give it to someone that has long standing and proven record in the company, but lacks the expertise. BTW I'm not the one making the decision, but I am influencing it. I was hoping to approach it from their unbiased view when asking the question to see how the community would respond to them vs someone with an obvious bias. Or if I should simply accept their plan which is currently for giving it to the dev manager.

From your reply, I put more thought into whether it'll be a chokepoint. It'll probably be good for me to find out whether they want the dev manager to also manage the BI project board, and further the discussion from there. Maybe that'll be a good indication of whether they should be separate or together. But it also makes me question if dev projects will take precedence over BI projects in that scenario. Thanks!

v-lid-msft 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you are talking about using Power BI as a tool to replace some of the development work. It's definitely something I've thought about, using dataflows, CDM, and Azure AS to optimize the data then integrating it with Power Apps, Flow, and other tools. And assigning work around templates, custom visuals and connectors for reusability of apps and parts simplifying the process to where the business, not just IT, can build both apps and reports. It's definitely somewhere I'd like to get us to, but I believe BI is way too far in the early stages here to even mention that idea and will be met by resistance including added resistance towards other BI plans. Though before your comment, I did not put two and two together and assumed BI and dev would always run in parallel. It's an interesting thought, and I'll definitely have to remember it for the future :) Thank you!