We're considering enabling self-service in Power BI, allowing users to add others to workspaces and share reports without going through the centralised access approval process. While this could streamline collaboration, it raises concerns around data governance, user recertification, and potential platform stability. How did you mitigate these risks or improve the approval workflow (using automations)?

Good Morning,

The city of Denver  has approxiamately 200 PowerBi users  Five years ago we formally formed a Data Program at the city, including a Chief Data Officer, Data Protection Team and Data Analysts/Data Engineers/Data Architects.  We expanded our PowerBI program using self service allowing users ownershio of workspaces and sharing reports. To address concerns identified above, we have a reqular PowerBI user group, Data Governance program and several PowerBi system administrators.  We limit access to the PowerBI gateways (on premise and in the cloud), use federated authentication/service accounts to limit user access outside of PowerBI desktop.  We have engaged vendors including Microsoft to provide guidance and best practices on using and administrating PowerBi.  That has allowed us to manage unused dashboards.  Having a regular PowerBI user group and Data Governance allow us (TS) to develop strong relationships with our agency users.   Our Software Asset Management (team) is involved in managing licenses and we are able to reuse unused licenses. At the City level, we have formal approved policies supporting Data Governance and Data Protectiion team (Data privacy. data classification).  Hope this helps, Jim

Here are some ideas:
1. Implement governance to support a certification process for reports. At a minimum, allow your organization and user base to identify which reports have been certified, regardless of their source.
2. Maintain a report catalog to improve visibility into report usage and increase awareness of what already exists on your platform.
3. Enable one of the Microsoft Capacity Metrics reports to identify reports that are the biggest consumers of platform resources and performance ("top offenders"). This will help you target specific reports and their creators with improvement actions and best practices.

The first I would enable is secure backups as we're handling and how to distribute and share the data in case the system goes awry. Even with this in place, what if Power BI isn't enough and you need to scale it leveraging other technologies and even custom solutions? Put it in perspective, determining the potential size of your customer base and how you acquire and maintain them puts it all in perspective.