Forum Discussion
Report management in your enterprise environment
All,
I am curious about how reports (and Power BI itself) are managed in your enterprise environment.
A few of our users are trying Power BI Desktop to build dashboards. They use CSV files etc. and the dashboard is for their own use or a small number of collegues. Let's call this a Tactical report. But we also have users who will build reports for C-level. Let's call this Strategic reports.
So here are the challeges I see, wondering how this is managed in your environment:
- Who will own the reports? IT, Enterprise BI or the Business?
- Will versioning of the report be applied? Will it be only for Strategic reports or also Tactical?
- Does a (strategic) report need to follow a certain certification path?
- Does someone need to approve the report (4-eye principle)?
- Does the report follow Development, Test, Acceptance, Production stages?
- Who supports Power BI from a functional perspective? Is this a Power BI Champion in the business?
- Who can share reports? Is this in the whole organisation, individual, outside the organisation or specific users?
- In who's user profile are the reports stored when published to the Power BI cloud portal? Will they be accessible when that person leaves the company?
- Do you enable security? like IP restriction, conditonal access, multifactor authentication when accessing (strategic) reports?
- Is Power BI auditing enabled and is this monitored?
- Who manages the Power BI Admin portal? (the one where you can enabled sharing outside the organisation etc.)
Thanks!
RalJans I'll answer with this, there are some seriously good presentations all revolving around the administration of Power BI in the Enterprise that were given at Data Insights, luckily all those are available for you to watch here
I'm sure people could bullet point answers that correspond with their deployments, but I would imagine you'll find the solutions vary greatly. The "It depends" answer is highly likely.
Power BI supports all of these scenarios. There are aspects that I would imagine are in use throughout an organization in a complete deployment. Let me know if you want a bullet by bullet answer based on my experiance, but in general terms IT would most likely manage heavily used datasets that are distributed widely. Those reports would require a higher level of scrutiny depending on audience and follow a process for creation/change. The mid tier deployment of business unit can be more flexible, but may follow some change management. And finally, ad hoc use is wide open.
I would argue that an Admin manage things in the IT / Business space and also monitor what is going on in the environment to look for opportunities to pull reports into a more structured IT / Top down approach if it becomes widely used...
There has also been an extensive white paper written on this topic by cwebb and Melissa Coates that is a fantastic in depth piece that addresses all these methodologies. You can find that here under "Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment"
2 Replies
RalJans I'll answer with this, there are some seriously good presentations all revolving around the administration of Power BI in the Enterprise that were given at Data Insights, luckily all those are available for you to watch here
I'm sure people could bullet point answers that correspond with their deployments, but I would imagine you'll find the solutions vary greatly. The "It depends" answer is highly likely.
Power BI supports all of these scenarios. There are aspects that I would imagine are in use throughout an organization in a complete deployment. Let me know if you want a bullet by bullet answer based on my experiance, but in general terms IT would most likely manage heavily used datasets that are distributed widely. Those reports would require a higher level of scrutiny depending on audience and follow a process for creation/change. The mid tier deployment of business unit can be more flexible, but may follow some change management. And finally, ad hoc use is wide open.
I would argue that an Admin manage things in the IT / Business space and also monitor what is going on in the environment to look for opportunities to pull reports into a more structured IT / Top down approach if it becomes widely used...
There has also been an extensive white paper written on this topic by cwebb and Melissa Coates that is a fantastic in depth piece that addresses all these methodologies. You can find that here under "Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment"
Thanks, interesting videos.
