I was just writing a piece about the role of a Power BI Admin and had a sudden thought. There are so many settings that a Power BI Admin can turn on (or off) that will determine the kind of experience a Power BI user will have, especially a newbie. I started remembering my experiences at a large corporation, setting up a new service. We had so many hoops to jump through to get it established and approved! At the time, I perceived the rigor as sluggish bureaucracy, particularly at the beginning. Over time, however, I began to appreciate and even value the methodical process we were following, which was based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library standards (ITIL). Yes, the process slowed us down, but it ensured that when our new service finally landed it would be well supported by the Service Desk and the IT infrastructure, thereby ensuring a better experience to our user community.
I did some quick googling on Power BI and ITIL and didn’t come up with much (but to be fair I haven’t dug very deep yet). So I think I am going to start a series of think pieces on ITIL and Power BI. I don’t think I will start from the beginning of the ITIL, but will pick and choose the aspects I focus on. I am going to think first about Power BI and the Service Desk (or Help Desk) because it strikes me that this is an interesting challenge for large organizations that want to implement Power BI widely. These types of businesses (such as the one I used to work for) are likely to have outsourced their Service Desk functionality, so implementing Power BI will also require contractual changes.
Are you reading this and work in an ITIL environment? Have you implemented Power BI using ITIL principles? I would love to hear your comments/experiences below.
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