Could you please share any insights, best practices, or recommendations on how organizations can establish robust data governance frameworks within Power BI? I'm particularly interested in learning about key considerations, steps, and tools involved in implementing and enforcing data governance policies and procedures.

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Data Scientist8 months ago

Key Considerations, Steps, and Tools
Key Considerations
1.Data Quality: Ensuring data accuracy and consistency.
2.Security and Compliance: Protecting data and complying with regulations.
3.User Training: Educating users on governance policies and procedures.
4.Stakeholder Engagement: Involving key stakeholders in the governance process.
Steps to Implement Data Governance
1.Define Governance Strategy: Establish clear objectives and success metrics.
2.Assign Roles and Responsibilities: Designate data owners, stewards, and protection officers.
3.Develop Policies and Procedures: Create guidelines for data handling, security, and compliance.
4.Implement Technical Controls: Use tools like Power BI to manage data access, quality, and security.
5.Monitor and Audit: Regularly review and audit data governance practices.
Tools for Data Governance in Power BI
1.Power BI Service: For managing data access and sharing.
2.Azure Purview: For data cataloging and governance.
3.Microsoft Information Protection: For data classification and protection.

Reference links : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/guidance/
https://www.data-flux.com/blog/power-bi-03-how-to-secure-your-power-bi-data-best-practices-for-data-governance 
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/guidance/fabric-adoption-roadmap-governance

Data Manager9 months ago

When implementing and enforcing data governance policies and procedures, it's essential to start by understanding the nature and capabilities of your tools. Using Power BI to build data solutions involves leveraging its strengths in data visualization (reports) and its integration with the local relational databases (semantic models). This allows you to quickly develop solutions that formalize both business and technical requirements, particularly useful in automating traditional Excel-oriented data tasks, where significant value often lies. These solutions can be deployed in a pre-production environment using an agile approach, giving business teams valuable tools for data validation, analysis, KPI tracking, monitoring key data-driven processes, and identifying improvement opportunities.

However, creating a robust data governance framework in a production environment involves more than just deploying tools. It requires disciplined management across three core pillars: data source management, data transformation pipelines, and data visualization practices. By focusing on these areas with a decision-gate project approach between them, you can ensure that data governance not only supports daily business needs but also scales to meet long-term strategic goals.

Of course, there are additional considerations based on your specific operational context, but this approach provides already a strong foundation for building a data governance program that adapts to evolving business needs generating ROI.

Data Manager in Miscellaneous9 months ago

For data governance in the Microsoft environment, I would recommend Microsoft Purview. Microsoft Purview houses a comprehensive set of data governance and management solutions that helps organizations understand, protect, and manage their data across various environments. Purview combines data governance capabilities from Azure Purview with compliance and risk management tools from Microsoft 365. Its primary functions include:
-Data discovery and classification
-Data protection and privacy management
-Risk and compliance monitoring
-Data cataloging and lineage tracking.

For policy and procedure considerations, you would want to ensure you have a data governance framework in place (this includes a governance board, data owners, data stewards, etc.) to help drive change. Enforcement is key, but your ultimate aim should be a shift in culture and mindset around data end-to-end. 
For these, I recommend you look into the amazing work of The Global Data Management Community (DAMA). Their website is: https://www.dama.org/cpages/home. 
DAMA has world-class resources on Data Governance and on the larger subject of Data Management.
Hope this helps. Happy to chat further if you would like.

IT Coordinator in Education9 months ago

As far as Tools go, Microsoft offers a range of tools to help with classifying data in Power BI. These include data  labels, using tags, data classification and data category specifications. Microsoft Purview is also a great tool for establishing security in Power BI. All these tools typically align to a data security and strategy plan, with policies and enterprise level classifiers, identifiers, labels and categories in place. 
For key considerations, recommend not underestimating the effort involved and who to involve, at the front end. A well thought out roadmap goes a long way to helping define a successful roll out. I'm afraid the steps are a little complicated to cover in a response, but recommend engaging either a Subject Matter Expert or Project Manager. Gartner will be able to help with these! 
As far as implementing and enforcing, a good/solid data governance strategy, plan/policies and procedures should be able to anchor all technical policies and procedures. Hope this helps! Please feel free to reach out.

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