Power BI Governance Archives

Power BI Governance, What Organisations Need to Know

Power BI Governance Art Built by Bing Image Creator

In recent years, Power BI has become one of the most widely used business intelligence (BI) tools. Power BI is more than just a reporting tool; it is a comprehensive analytical platform that enables users to collaborate on data insights and share them internally and externally. In addition to creating reports and dashboards, Power BI allows users to collaborate and share their work with others. For instance, users can share dashboards with their colleagues, allowing them to view, interact, and engage with the data quickly. However, as more organisations adopt Power BI, it becomes essential to ensure appropriate governance processes, policies, and rules are in place. This blog post explains Power BI governance and why business owners need to be conscious of it.

Power BI governance refers to a set of processes, policies, and standards that organisations put in place to manage and control the use of Power BI. Governance is critical to ensure that the use of Power BI is aligned with the organisation’s objectives and strategy, complies with relevant regulations and standards, and protects sensitive data. Power BI governance encompasses several areas, including security, data management, compliance, and user management. It also involves defining data access, sharing, security, and compliance guidelines within Power BI. This includes defining roles and permissions for users, specifying approved data sources that can be used, and ensuring that the data is accurate, up-to-date, and secure across the organisation. In addition, Power BI governance involves monitoring and auditing the use of Power BI to ensure that it is being used appropriately and in compliance with the organisation’s policies. Lack of Power BI governance can impact businesses in various negative ways, so it is important that everyone within the organisation, especially the managerial teams, has a good understanding of how they can benefit from supporting the establishment of Power BI governance across the organisation. Here are some reasons:

Better decision-making
With Power BI governance in place, organisations can ensure that the data used in decision-making is accurate, consistent, and trustworthy. This can help them make informed decisions based on reliable data insights.
Improved security and compliance
Power BI governance helps to establish security measures to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with regulations and industry standards. This helps to avoid costly data breaches and non-compliance penalties.
Efficient use of resources
By establishing guidelines for roles and responsibilities, data access, sharing, and storage, Power BI governance can help organisations use their resources more efficiently. This can result in cost savings and improved productivity.
Enhanced collaboration
Having Power BI governance policies help business owners to promote collaboration and communication among team members. This can result in improved teamwork and better outcomes for the organisation.
Better management and control
Power BI governance helps organisations to manage and control the use of Power BI within the organisation. This can help them ensure that the tool is being used effectively and efficiently and that data is being used in a way that aligns with their business objectives.

Continue reading →

Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Desktop RS, Power BI Governance, Power BI Service, Self-Service BI

Good Practice: Use Security Groups in Role Mapping Instead of User Accounts in Power BI Row Level Security (RLS)

Row-level security (RLS) is a feature of Power BI that allows you to restrict data access for different users based on filters you define within roles. For example, you can create a role for Sales Managers and apply a filter that only shows them the sales data for their region. This way, you can ensure that each user only sees the data that is relevant and appropriate for them.

However, managing RLS roles can be challenging if you have a large number of users or if your user base changes frequently. You need to manually assign each user account to one or more roles, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. Moreover, if a user changes their position or leaves the organisation, you must update their role membership accordingly.

This is where Security Groups become handy. Security groups are collections of user accounts that share common characteristics or permissions. You can create security groups on your Azure Active Directory (AAD) or Microsoft 365 Admin Centre and add users based on their roles or responsibilities. For instance, you can create a security group for each sales region and add all the sales managers who belong to that region.

By using security groups in Power BI RLS role mapping, you can simplify and, somehow, automate the process of RLS management. Instead of adding individual user accounts to roles, you can add security groups as members of roles. This way, you only need to maintain the membership of security groups once, and Power BI will automatically apply the RLS filters to all the users within those groups.

Using security groups in role mapping has several benefits. The following are the top four:

Continue reading →

Data Visualisation, Dataflows, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Embedded Capacity, Power BI Governance, Power BI Paginated, Power BI Premium Capacity, Power BI Service, Power Query, Self-Service BI

Power BI 101, What Should I Learn?

This is the second part of my new series of Power BI posts named Power BI 101. In the previous post, I briefly discussed what Power BI is. In this post, I look into one of the most confusing parts for those who want to start learning Power BI. Many people jump straight online and look for Power BI training courses which there are plenty out there. But which one is the right training course for you? Let’s find out.

What do you want to gain from learning Power BI?

Regardless of attending paid training courses or being a self-learner, the above question is one of the most important questions you might ask yourself before going to the next steps. The answer to this question dictates the sort of training you must look for. Your answer to the preceding question can be one or none of the following:

I am a graduate/student looking at the job market
I am a business analyst and I want to know how Power BI can help you with my daily job
I am a database developer and I want to learn more about business intelligence and data and analytics space
I am a non-Microsoft Business Intelligence developer and I want to start learning more about Microsoft offerings
I am a system admin and I have to manage our Power BI tenant
I am a data scientist and I want to know how I can use Power BI
I am just ciourious to see what Power BI can do for me

As mentioned, your answer might not be any of the above, but, thinking about your reason(s) for learning Power BI can help you to find the best way to learn and use Power BI more efficiently. You can spend time and money taking some online courses and get even more confused. You don’t want that do you?

So, whatever reason(s) you have in mind to learn Power BI, most probably you fall into one of the following user categories:

Think about your goal(s) and what you want to achieve by learning Power BI then try to identify your user category. For instance, if you are a student thinking of joining an IT company as a data and analytics developer, then your user category is most probably a Power BI Developer or a Contributor.

To help you find out your user category let’s see what the above user categories mean.

Power BI Developers

The Power BI Developers are the beating hearts of any Power BI development project. Regardless of the project you will be involved with, you definitely require to have a certain level of knowledge of the following:

Data preparation/ETL processes
Data warehousing
Data modelling/Star schema
Data visualisation

To be a successful Power BI developer you must learn the following languages in Power BI:

Power Query
DAX

Depending on the types of projects you will be involved in, you may require to learn the following languages as well:

Microsoft Visual Basic (for Paginated Reports)
Python
R
T-SQL
PL/SQL

As a Power BI developer, you will write a lot of Power Query and DAX expressions. Most probably you require to learn T-SQL as well. The following resources can be pretty helpful:

Continue reading →

Azure, Business Intelligence - BI, Data Catalog, Power BI, Power BI Governance, Purview, Self-Service BI

Power BI Governance, Good Practices: Setting up Azure Purview for Power BI

Microsoft newly announced a piece of very exciting news that Azure Purview now supports Power BI. This is massive news from a data governance point of view. Azure Purview is the next generation of Azure Data Catalog with more metadata discovery power and the ability to use sensitivity labels. After reading the news, I immediately decided to set up my test environment and give it a go. I followed the steps mentioned in this article on the Microsoft documentation website but I faced some difficulties to get it to work. And here we are, another blog post to help you to set up the Azure Purview for Power BI.

Note: In this blog post I am not intending to explain what Azure Purview is. You can find heaps of useful information here.

Creating an Azure Purview Resource

We first need to have an Azure subscription, if you don’t have, don’t worry, you can start your Azure free trial subscription here. The following steps explain how to set up Azure Purview for Power BI:Login to the Azure Portal