You may have seen things that make you say “that’s Power BI AF” but none of them have come close to this. It’s literally the Power BI AF^[1].

That’s right – this week Microsoft published the Power BI Adoption Framework on GitHub and YouTube. If you’re impatient, here’s the first video – you can jump right in. It serves as an introduction to the framework, its content, and its goals.

Without attempting to summarize the entire framework, this content provides a set of guidance, practices, and resources to help organizations build a data culture, establish a Power BI center of excellence, and manage Power BI at any scale.

Even though I blog a lot about Power BI dataflows, most of my job involves working with enterprise Power BI customers – global organizations with thousands of users across the business who are building, deploying, and consuming BI solutions built using Power BI.

Each of these large customers takes their own approach to adopting Power BI, at least when it comes to the details. But with very few exceptions^[2], each successful customer will align with the patterns and practices presented in the Power BI Adoption Framework – and when I work with a customer that is struggling with their global Power BI rollout, their challenges are often rooted in a failure to adopt these practices.

There’s no single “right way” to be successful with Power BI, so don’t expect a silver bullet. Instead, the Power BI Adoption Framework presents a set of roles, responsibilities, and behaviors that have been developed after working with customers in real-world Power BI deployments.

If you look on GitHub today, you’ll find a set of PowerPoint decks broken down into five topics, plus a few templates.

These slide decks are still a little rough. They were originally built for use by partners who could customize and deliver them as training content for their customers^[3], rather than for direct use by the general public, and as of today they’re still a work in progress. But if you can get past the rough edges, there’s definitely gold to be found. This is the same content I used when I put together my “Is self-service business intelligence a two-edged sword?” presentation earlier this year, and for the most part I just tweaked the slide template and added a bunch of sword pictures.

And if the slides aren’t quite ready for you today, you can head over to the official Power BI YouTube channel where this growing playlist contains bite-size training content to supplement the slides. As of today there are two videos published – expect much more to come in the days and weeks ahead.

The real heroes of this story^[4] are Manu Kanwarpal and Paul Henwood.  They’re both cloud solution architects working for Microsoft in the UK. They’ve put the Power BI AF together, delivered its content to partners around the world, and are now working to make it available to everyone.

What do you think?

To me, this is one of the biggest announcements of the year, but I really want to hear from you after you’ve checked out the Power BI AF. What questions are still unanswered? What does the AF not do today that you want or need it to do tomorrow?

Please let me know in the comments below – this is just a starting point, and there’s a lot that we can do with it from here…

^[1] If you had any idea how long I’ve been waiting to make this joke…

^[2] I can’t think of a single exception at the moment, but I’m sure there must be one or two. Maybe.

^[3] Partners can still do this, of course.

^[4] Other than you, of course. You’re always a hero too – never stop doing what you do.