Power BI remains one of the most widely adopted business intelligence platforms in the market and now it’s official (again): Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and BI Platforms, for the 18th consecutive year. You can access a copy of the report here. But even when using a leading platform, designing and delivering successful Power BI services projects aren’t a given.
Microsoft continues to dominate BI platform adoption, driven by Power BI’s cloud capabilities and seamless integration with Microsoft Fabric – Microsoft’s all-in-one SaaS data platform. Power BI is no longer just a tool for building dashboards and reporting, it’s now part of a broader enterprise data foundation that enables everything from real-time analytics to AI insights.
If you’re using Power BI, or planning to, here are five key challenges to be mindful of, that we regularly help organisations navigate.
1. Understanding What Users Want & Need
It sounds basic, but it is a common issue we come across. Often Power BI can be architected without an enterprise view of what users want and need, just a ‘solve-a-problem’ view. Anyone can build an Excel model but this is usually for personal use, when you’re designing Power BI to be used across the enterprise it needs to be performant, engaging, tell a story and make it easy to deliver actionable insights. The way to do this is to get users involved upfront in the scoping of the dashboard / reporting project, think about what behaviour you want users to take or actions you’re trying to drive and be clear about measures and definitions and document these across the enterprise.
2. Fragmented Datasets & Skill Gaps
Creating a new dataset for every report might feel like progress, but it can actually create long-term issues and multiple versions of the truth. Instead, build reusable datasets that serve multiple reports and teams. This approach reduces redundancy, optimises performance and promotes consistency across the organisation. There should be a clear, business-aligned glossary of key terms, metrics and KPIs that everyone works from. It’s also critical that the team working on your Power BI services environment has expertise beyond DAX, including Power Query (M), SQL and now, increasingly, familiarity with Microsoft Fabric and the underlying data platform.
3. Inconsistent Access Control
Don’t rely solely on Power BI App access to manage user permissions. Without proper row-level security and integration with Azure Active Directory, your reports are exposed to manual errors and governance risks. Identify the team responsible for identity management and/or Azure Active Directory in your business and work with them on the creation of management groups to support Power BI.
4. Low Power BI Adoption
It’s important to have a basic Power BI usage and environment monitoring solution in place to understand licensing, capacity (Pro vs. Premium) and adoption. The Power BI Premium Metrics app, the Power BI activity log and having a Power BI Admin role should ensure you understand available resources in place and how they’re being used. Power BI and resource activity can change quickly so an active approach to administration of your Power BI environment is critical to not only check for bottlenecks or issues but to share future plans with users to ensure alignment.
5. Project Silos & Duplicated Logic
When individual teams or departments build their own reports and models in isolation, it leads to confusion about KPI’s/metrics, duplicated effort, version control issues and inconsistent data definitions. So, create a shared data foundation that structures and houses business / data logic, combine this with centralised modelling and data governance to ensure scalability and consistency across business units. It’s also a good idea to use the same analytics team or analytics partner working on your Power BI services environment to span multiple data and analytics projects to overcome duplication of effort.
These are only a few common Power BI challenges we find businesses face. At BoomData, we provide scalable Power BI services that align with your data strategy, whether you’re starting fresh, expanding your data capabilities, or looking to improve data management, governance and user adoption. If you’d like to read more about Gartner’s rating of Microsoft Power BI and other vendors, you can access a copy of the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and BI Platforms below.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform, Anirudh Ganeshan, Edgar Macari, Kurt Schlegel, Christopher Long, Jamie O’Brien [June 18, 2025]
The report was titled as Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2013-17 and as Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms – 6 February 2008-12.
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