In this episode of The Power BI Edge, Evert Augustyns, Senior Manager in Data and Analytics at TriFinance Belgium, joins Host Erik Lidman to discuss a crucial topic often overlooked as Power BI adoption explodes: governance. As 550,000 companies now run Power BI, many struggle with their workspace turning into "Power BI spaghetti", leading to different versions of the truth and security risks. Evert shares TriFinance's framework for implementing light but effective governance, balancing self-service flexibility with central control.

🔑 Key Topics:

- The Governance Framework: Tri Finance's four-pillar approach focusing on people, processes, tools, and underlying data.

- Balancing Self-Service and Control: Defining different layers of self-service, from personalized visuals on validated data to building reports from scratch on a semantic model.

- Case Study: From Spaghetti to Structure: A real-world example of moving a telecom company from 50 different workspaces and untrusted data to a robust data warehouse, defined KPIs, and a structured sprint process.

- Fabric and Future Governance: The challenge and opportunity of Fabric integrating data engineering and business reporting, requiring security alignment from the source (OneLake).

- Advice for Beginners: Start small with proof of concepts and implement governance step-by-step as usage grows

—It's better to start without governance than not at all, but be aware of future growth.

⌛ Episode Highlights and Timestamps:

[00:00:00] - Evert Augustyns: Senior Manager, Data and Analytics at Tri Finance.

[00:04:17] - The Power BI Spaghetti Problem: How Power BI replaces Excel spaghetti but creates a new kind of mess without governance.

[00:07:36] - Balancing Control and Self-Service: Starting from a validated data set.

[00:14:35] - Source Code Control: Advanced users adopt it for semantic models, but it's often too complex for key business users.

[00:16:03] - The Aimplan Edge: Adding data input (budgeting, commenting) directly to Power BI reports.

[00:23:50] - Case Study: The Telecom Company: Moving from 50 separate workspaces and untrusted data to a robust data warehouse and structured process.

[00:28:37] - Fabric's Governance Challenge: Integrating data engineering and business reporting requires pushing security alignment further to the source (OneLake).

[00:30:23] - Closing Remarks and Contact Information (trifinance.be)

📱 Follow our guest, Evert Augustyns:

👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evert-augustyns-848a5a41/

📱 Follow our TriFinance Belgium:

👉 Website: https://www.trifinance.com/en-be

👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trifinance-belgium/

👉 Instagram: