Chapter 12: Deploying, Governing, and Adopting Power BI

Now that you have learned the fundamentals of working with Power BI and have seen Power BI's powerful analytics and visualizations features firsthand, it is time to turn our attention to the broader topics of deployment, governance, and the adoption of Power BI within an organization. This chapter is designed to help you understand the organizational issues and requirements of Power BI within an enterprise. Understanding the bigger picture when it comes to Power BI will help you better understand and navigate the journey of Power BI use and adoption within your organization. To this end, we cover the various deployment and usage scenarios used by most organizations. In addition, we cover the important organizational topics of governance and administration, providing detailed information on the configuration of Power BI tenant settings, as well as a phased deployment process for the development and creation of Power BI content...

Technical requirements

You will need the following to successfully complete this chapter:

• An internet connection.
• An Office 365 account or Power BI trial.
• If you have skipped any of the previous chapters, you can download the LearnPowerBI.pbix file from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Power-BI-second-edition.
• Check out the following video to see the Code in Action: https://bit.ly/3bWWGB3

Understanding usage models

Power BI provides considerable flexibility regarding how organizations deploy and adopt it. There are nearly limitless ways to organize and use such things as workspaces, apps, and dataflows, as well as how organizations choose to share and distribute content. We call the overall architecture and plan for how organizations deploy and utilize Power BI usage models. Usage models encapsulate how an organization adopts and utilizes the various components of Power BI in order to provide governance and processes around the use of Power BI.

The following sections explore some of the more common usage models for Power BI. However, keep in mind that there are nearly unlimited usage models as organizations can combine aspects of different usage models in different ways in order to facilitate the particular needs of their organization. The usage models covered here can be thought of as archetypes, or base usage scenarios, that demonstrate particular desired outcomes...

Governing and administering Power BI

Governance of Power BI is a broad and potentially complex subject that can encompass the overall data governance within an organization as well as Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service. However, at its core, governance for Power BI is simply a set of established rules and policies regarding what people can do with organizational data.

The overall goals of governance in the context of Power BI are as follows:

• Empower business users to use data for making decisions.
• Comply with applicable government, industry, and contractual regulations.
• Establish rules that comply with organizational requirements.

The usage models in the Understanding usage models section within this chapter are one way of implementing governance. For example, controlling who is allowed to publish official datasets is an example of governance. By centralizing the creation of datasets and metrics, business users can be empowered because it is ensured...

Adopting Power BI

The subject of an organization adopting a disruptive technology such as Power BI is a vast and complex subject and a complete treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of this book. However, this section introduces the topic and provides the essential strategies for adopting Power BI within an organization.

Adoption as covered here is the diffusion of a disruptive technology within an organization. It means that a technology progresses from being used infrequently by a small percentage of an organization to being used by the entire organization on a daily basis. Power BI, a self-service business intelligence technology, should be viewed as a disruptive technology that must be evangelized in order to promote its use throughout an organization.

The basic underpinnings of the diffusion of technology within a society is a well-researched subject within scientific literature, popularized in 1962 by Everett Rodger's seminal work, Diffusion of Innovation....

Summary

This chapter diverged from the step-by-step, hands-on learning of Power BI to encompass the larger topics of the overall deployment, usage, governance, administration, and adoption of Power BI within an organization. This chapter explored various strengths and weaknesses of different usage models representing the big picture of how Power BI is deployed and used within an organization. When Power BI is deployed and used by an organization, the topics of governance and administration naturally come to the fore and thus this chapter also covered important governance and administrative topics such as tenant settings and the process of deploying Power BI content. Finally, Power BI used by a single individual is powerful but when used by an entire organization can create a data culture that makes the entire organization more efficient and effective and thus we covered the topic of adoption and proposed adoption strategies that can assist in diffusing the disruptive technology of...

Questions

As an activity, try to answer the following questions on your own:

• What is a Power BI usage model?
• What usage model is used by many new Power BI deployments?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the centralized usage model?
• How do the distributed and golden dataset usage models address the weaknesses of the centralized usage model?
• What are the overall goals of governance in terms of Power BI?
• What approach is recommended when it comes to configuring Power BI tenant settings?
• How are Power BI tenant settings accessed?
• A phased approach for the development and deployment of content is called what?
• What feature in Power BI Premium enables the phased development and deployment of content?
• What is an important trait of early adopters?

Further reading

To learn more about the topics that were covered in this chapter, please take a look at the following references:

• Administering Power BI in the admin portal: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-portal
• Sensitivity Labels in Power BI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-security-sensitivity-label-overview
• Power BI REST APIs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/
• Configuring Azure Log Analytics for Power BI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/transform-model/log-analytics/desktop-log-analytics-configure
• Data classification for dashboards: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-data-classification
• Tutorial: Embed Power BI content using a sample embed for your customers application: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/embed-sample-for-customers
• What are Power BI template apps?: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi...