Power BI Roles and Responsibilities

[mcornfield]

Hello,

We are just starting to Implement Power BI across our Company.

We have all the IT functions available, but we are looking to make recommendations on new responsibilities/ New Roles we will need for Power BI. Here is what I wrote up. Let me know if anything is missing?

• Power BI Roles
  • Power BI Admin (2-3 ppl) Not primary Function Mixture of IT/BI
    • Setting up the platform.
    • Coordinating integration with Office 365.
    • Assigning Power BI licenses.
    • Monitoring Power BI usage.
    • Manage Desktop Tenant
    • Managing gateways.
    • Managing PBI Service
    • Administering Power BI tenant settings.
  • Power BI Capacity Admin (1-2 ppl) Not primary Function (IT/BI)
    • Setting up Premium capacities.
    • Configure capacity settings
    • Manage workloads per capacity
    • Manage workspaces per capacity
    • Monitor health of capacity
    • Coordinating with the Office 365/Azure team.
    • Assigning and managing workspaces
    • Managing those workspace capacities
    • Collaborating with data architects and development teams.
  • Data Security Manager (1 ppl) (IT Resource)
    • Data security managers are responsible for data residence, auditing, and data policy enforcement. They use audit log search and data classification settings in the Power BI admin portal to track data movement. They ensure that the company follows all security compliance policies, storing data securely without compromising accessibility.
  • Data Architect/Data ETL & Processing Expert(1-2 ppl) (IT Resource)
    • familiar with what Power BI can do and translates user requests into design documents.
    • Someone who can figure out your company's data sources and coerce them into a tidy, groomed format. Should also be able to perform any transformations requests by your Power BI Developers
    • Data architects are often the heroes/heroines of the data story. They are the wizards who figure out how to get the data from the back end to the front end.
    • In a world of ever-evolving tools, architects need to be business savvy and possess deep technical skills. Data architects must know what's possible in the cloud architecture (i.e., Azure Services), even if they don't end up capitalizing on those possibilities.
    • To the extent the data architects are the ones who write the ETL, they also need to be skilled in data modeling and design, ETL scriptwriting, setting up jobs, and keeping the flow from the back end, making it to the front end.
  • Power BI Developer (2-3 ppl) (Primary Function) (BI Team)
    • Data Engineer: Power Query Developer
    • Data Modeler- Relationships
    • DAX Developer
    • Report Visualizer
    • BI developers build stuff. Ideally, they are joined at the hip with business teams or data analysts getting the requirements. A lot of the time, these BI developers are business analysts. That certainly is part of Microsoft's vision— the dream of self-service but with all the sophistication of rigorous models.
    • It's hard to find people with deep DAX, modeling, Power Query, and visualization skills who are also good at analyzing the business. If you find such a person, reward them well, or someone else will.
  • Enterprise Power BI Manager (1 ppl)
    • Knowledge of all of the above + Manage the Roll out OR implementation OR the deployment of Power BI.
    • Put together the people, the knowledge, and the tools needed for the successful deployment of power bi.
      • Including Training
      • Project Management
      • User Support
      • Data Modeling
    • The cheerleader, the critic, and the business and technical expert in terms of Power BI.
    • Have tentacles across all the business units and take every opportunity to promote Power BI where appropriate and the results we have achieved through the platform so far.
    • Passionate about the deployment mission, recognizing what's working (especially around adoption), and then changing course quickly if it's not working.

[lbendlin]

You are missing at least two roles

- data scientists - for the statistical and AI/ML parts of your Power BI implementation

- data stewards.  You have "Data architects"  but that role is not fully covering the responsibilities of company wide data subject inventory  and policy management.  Granted, this is not really a Power BI specific need but it has a giant impact on the success of your Power BI implementation.

You also seem to be missing the finance aspect.  Vendor management and licence/capacity cost renegotiations etc.