Do you have a vision for a Power BI implementation? Maybe you should. There are a lot of parts and pieces to Power BI. Do you even know what Fabric has to do with Power BI?

The start of Power BI was a Windows desktop application that created visualizations. There were only a couple of data connections like SQL Server and Excel. But this tool eventually added a web service component to publish the visuals. Some called the published content a dashboard, but others called it a report.

Publish to web

Other terms have enter the vocabulary once Power BI became mainstream in enterprises. Data quality, governance, and deployments to name a few. These all brought an ability to manage or administrate the Power BI environment.

                                                                       Star Schema

These ideas have lead a group of Microsoft employees and Power BI enthusiasts to create an organizational term called Center of Excellence. The idea is to put together best practices for the various stages or implementations of Enterprise Business Intelligence. You could use this guidance for other visualization tools as well.

                                                                    Center of Excellence

The process to get from where you are today to a Center of Excellence all depends on how far into implementation your company is. Do they have self-service BI? Does IT handle semantic model and reports? Is it a mixture of both? Maybe you have not event started?

Training on the wide range of options and implementations will be a good start. Using a range of questions for different IT and Business Users, a consultant can scale down the needed options to help with your implementation of Power BI.

Oh yeah, now its called Microsoft Fabric…