Portland Power Platform World Tour

Need to make some Power BI architectural changes to feel like things aren’t spinning out of control? Unsure how to handle Workspace proliferation, whether to use Certified Data Sets or SSAS to “grow up” your use of the platform? Not sure of how much mash-up you should allow? Or just feel like you are unsure of the downsides of the governance/permissions/policy choices you are making? This session is for you.

Power BI has delivered remarkably on several of its platform promises. It is an enterprise solution – robust enough to handles huge volumes of data at great speed, secure enough to handle highly sensitive data. It is flexible enough to let you plug and play components to match your budget, extensible enough to integrate with a wide array of data sources. Moreover, it has stayed true the vision of democratizing data analytics.

The challenge of all this power and flexibility is that people can go rogue quickly with the platform. This means two things: adoption and governance suffer. They suffer not because people set out to go rogue, but because there are a myriad of architectural decisions that get made randomly. Some of those result in performance, UI and data quality issues that drive people away from adopting, some of them result in far worse – like data breaches and inaccurate reporting.

This session will present a framework – the Adoption/Governance/Cost framework – as a tool to help make Power BI Architecture/Infrastructure decisions. Every architectural decision has an impact on adoption, governance and cost. The flexibility of the platform mandates a lot of decision-making. You can’t know all the ramifications of those architecture choices, but methodically evaluating them for impact on adoption, governance and cost is a great start.