stop users publishing

[pork]

So my organisation are wanting to use powerbi. We are a central BI team and have been an MS based team for quite some time. Powerbi answers a bunch of questiosn for us that we're challenged on so we're using it now and will pgrade to 2016 on prem when it lands. However, we are in the process also organisationally in introducting more robust governance, skills, standards and data management that with our current culture, could/would be undone if my organisations users downloaded powerbi desktop and were able to publish themselves and then share that data to their colleagues. Obviously - thats the dream right? no need for a team to do it if your users are empowered. Maybe, but not yet for us.

Now i can see how in admin i can remove a powerbi licence but that will also remove a users ability to access a dashboard. s there a role i can assign to a user, or is there planned to be one, where a user can only read and not edit or publish to their own workspace. I get we can do stuff with groups. Alternatively can i remove "my workspace" and force users to only use groups?

Help! I want to centralise onto powerbi desktop, and allow the business to access to for data exploration perhaps, but not to publish and share. That's our bag for now, and I want to bring the org along a cultural journey that involves plenty of stops at training city, governance province and standard alley.

[Greg_Deckler]

@pork - Currently that is not a feature and I'd sort of be a bit surprised if they actually turned something like that on to be honest. That's exactly how BI has been done for years and largely why it has almost universally failed to meet the needs of the business and fulfill its true potential value. I hate to say it, but I think you are living in the past a bit. I can definitely see groups being expanded upon to provide "safe zones" perhaps, or maybe turn off sharing capabilities (I see that more for external users when that feature gets here) but completely not allowing users to create their own reports or share them internally? That sort of goes against why Power BI was created IMHO. And that goes for Tableau, Qlik, you can name the tool, they all are designed to thwart centralized BI. Because that model failed and generally will always fail. BI is not email, you just can't dictate "This is the only way" to the business with BI. It's different.

[pork]

Hey guys

So I wanted to resurface this post because, well, for clarity. We're an on premise organisation, we work with sensitive data, and we don't necessarily have the best, most mature approach to daa governance.

There's some risk here - consider how easy it is for Jonny Data who works in childrens social care, create a dashboard and publish it. No risk there... but he willshare that with my boss and his team - bearing in mind it defaults to shared users also can share the dashboard. Control is now out of Jonny's hands and... oh wait, Jonny forgot to anonymise the childrens data and the names and addresses are in the model.

And then the boss share's it cos the dashboard looks sexy.

And the recipients share it because it's helpful.

Then we get audited. Who can see what? who controls sharing? it's too risky without providing a basic awareness of what it means when your data goes into a model. How you can secure it. How to share it responsibly. How to make sure the audience understands how stale the data is.

Business Intelligence is about empowering the data workers - YES! but democratising functionality comes with risk, and that risk should be managed and that management isn't about not letting them do it ever, but it's about controlling who can do it by assuring they're aware of the risks.