Logic with dealing with Self Service and Corporate power BI

[DebbieE]

Say you work in a large organisation. You still want to have self service business led power BI to get people involved. But you also want corporate Power BI, So when reports have been proven as useful at business level they can be moved into Corporate, managed by a central team.

So, for our Corporate BI, we decided that we want to use Azure AD groups so we can centrally manage access levels for users.

Over in Self service, people can still share their reports and dashboards with other users etc etc. We dont want to stop anyone doing anything or stop people from enthusing about Power BI.

When really useful report(s) / Dashboard(s) get moved we want to users to be enthusiastic about the fact their work has moved up to full use, rather than then think they have lost control.

One of the things I thought of is this. Imagine you have a service (Sales) and Power BI enthusiasts are creating content for Sales.

we thought we could have a workspace, maybe called Self-Service Sales for them

Then some of the content is deemed as really useful and should be centralised. So we have another App Workspace called Centrally Managed Sales (Or Simply Sales. Not Sure yet) 

The reports are then republished into Centrally Managed Sales and anything supporting like Data flows, Datasets etc are also moved whilst eveything specific to these items are deleted from self service.

My Question is, is this the right way forward for this kind of approach?

How easy is it to move Dataflows, if they have been created in Service?

How easy is it to Move Dashboards that have been created in the Self Service App Workspace?

[nickyvv]

Hi @DebbieE,

Ouch, that's a good question, and not an easy one to answer, because "it depends" 🙂

We are also still struggling with this. I'll give it a try anyway!

There's a good theory of Enterprise and Self-service in Power BI, a mix between Business-Led Self-Service BI and IT-Managed Self-Service BI, described in several whitepapers and presentations by Power BI community leaders and MVP's.

I would start by having a look at the Power BI whitepapers:

• Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment 
• There used to be a Power BI Governance and Deployment Whitepaper, but I can't find it online anymore. It talks about those governance approaches mentioned above (in case you're interested I can send you the document).
  • Also @justblindbaek has a good presentation about it here.

The last I'd like to mention that comes to my mind, is a presentation at the Power Platform Summit Europe in 2019, where Line Krogh talked about Brons, Silver and Gold Power BI report templates that sound like the self-service and managed models that you would like to create:

• Gold: created by BI team on a managed Tabular model
• Silver: not created by BI team on a managed Tabular model
• Brons: not created by BI team on non-certified data sources

I hope this helps a bit, if you have any questions, or have chosen a direction, please let us know.

[DebbieE]

Great stuff,

Ive already read a few of these but Ill have a go through them again. What about the part of the question re Seperate Workspaces for each type Deployment type?

How easy is it to move Dataflows, if they have been created in Service?

How easy is it to Move Dashboards that have been created in the Self Service App Workspace?

I have a feeling you cant move Dashboards so actually this may be the wrong way to go.... Ill have a morning of research

thank you

[nickyvv · Accepted solution]

Thanks @DebbieE, it is a lot, but very useful indeed 🙂

You can export a JSON-file for a dataflow and import that again in the Service.
Dashboards can be moved programatically with the API and/or PowerShell, there's no way to export/import them unfortunately.

Concerning the separate workspaces, that is certainly an option. You can create a dev/test/prod separation or a Self-serve/test/prod like scenario.
You could also use Apps to separate some of this. A workspace can be the dev/test environment and the published App can be the production env. for you end users for example. That's depending on your needs and the capabilities you have to move different content.

Last, I'm not sure if you have Premium, but if you do then Deployment pipelines in the Service might be an option for you, that feature will be released in a few months:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave1/business-intelligence/deploym...

[DebbieE]

Thank you so much. This is all great stuff. Lots to think about. Im still reading through everything and trying to figure out the best approach

[jankrans]

Hi @DebbieE,

A couple of years later and we've stumbled across the same problem. Any updated on how you've approached this?

Very interested to hear how you tackled it.