Designing for Trust: How to Structure Power BI for Scalable Executive Reporting

Executive dashboards help leaders make better decisions, but pulling together data from across the organisation is rarely simple. When data lives in multiple systems, owned by different teams, it becomes difficult to ensure consistency, accuracy, and trust.

This article introduces a structured approach to solving that challenge using a tiered Power BI workspace model. By separating development, governance, and reporting into clearly defined layers, you can create dashboards that are scalable, secure, and trusted across all levels of leadership.

You’ll learn how to structure your Power BI environment to support flexible development, strong governance, and clear communication of insights at the executive level.

Key Takeaways

Structure your Power BI environment using a three-level model to separate development, governance, and executive reporting that improve trust, scalability, and clarity.
Use workspace types strategically at the development level (Unmanaged, Supported, Managed) to balance flexibility with control and define clear responsibilities.
Establish a curated data layer for governance, ensuring teams build reports from standardised, reviewed datasets that serve as a single source of truth.
Design executive dashboards with intent, focusing on strategic metrics, mobile optimisation, and consistent visual design to support high-level decision-making.
Maintain dashboards with discipline, including ownership, change tracking, access reviews, and feedback loops to keep them reliable and relevant over time.

Why Structure Matters: Laying the Foundation for Executive Reporting

Power BI adoption often starts organically, with business users creating their own workspaces and connecting directly to systems like SharePoint, Azure, or Excel. While this flexibility encourages innovation, it can lead to duplicated logic, inconsistent definitions, and confusion about which reports to trust.

Executive reporting demands more. Leaders need consistent, trusted insights that cut across finance, HR, sales, and operations. To deliver this at scale, your Power BI environment must balance freedom for development with clear governance.

A tiered workspace model supports this by dividing the environment into three levels:

Development: Source-specific workspaces where data is first explored
Governance: Curated datasets managed centrally
Reporting: Dashboards built for executives and organisation-wide use

Each level plays a distinct role in how data is prepared, governed, and delivered.

Understanding the Workspace Types

Let’s break down the types of workspaces you’ll typically find at the development level, each with its own strengths and trade-offs:

Unmanaged: Business-owned, ideal for exploration but prone to duplication
Supported: Shared by business and IT, balancing expertise and control
Managed: IT-owned, used for sensitive or critical datasets

Classifying workspaces this way supports scalable reporting, defines clear responsibilities, and ensures reliable outputs across the reporting lifecycle.

The table below summarises the three Power BI workspace types used at the development level, highlighting their ownership, purpose, and typical use cases.

Workspace Type	Ownership	Best For	Risks / Benefits	Example
Unmanaged	Business users	Team-level reporting, ad hoc analysis, prototyping	Risk: Inconsistent definitions, duplicated effort	Marketing team analyses campaign data in their own workspace
Supported	Business + IT (shared)	Operational reporting requiring both business and IT	Benefit: Combines domain expertise with technical support	HR and IT jointly report on onboarding and leave balances
Managed	IT or central analytics	High-stakes, sensitive, or organisation-wide reporting	Benefit: High control, security, and consistency	Finance dashboards built on general ledger data, governed for compliance

Building a Reporting Pipeline That Scales with Your Organisation

Executive reporting is not just about visuals, it’s about delivering consistent, trusted insights drawn from diverse systems across the business. Without structure, reporting efforts can become fragmented, duplicated, and unreliable.

A tiered Power BI workspace model solves this by organising your environment into three layers:

Level One: Development Workspaces – Where data is first connected, explored, and shaped, typically close to the source system or business team.
Level Two: Curated and Governed Workspaces – Centrally managed, these house approved datasets that form the foundation of reliable reporting.
Level Three: Executive and Organisation-Wide Reporting – Dashboards and reports built for leaders, drawing on governed data from Level Two.

This model empowers business users to explore, ensures data quality through governance, and delivers consistent insights to decision-makers. The next sections explain each level in detail with real-world examples to help you apply the approach in your own environment.

Level One: Source System and Business Development Workspaces

This is where data first enters Power BI and most hands-on development happens. These workspaces are typically aligned to specific source systems, such as Azure Cost Management, Salesforce, HRIS platforms, or finance systems or to business units that manage operational processes.

At this level, business users are empowered to connect to data, explore trends, develop draft reports, and build early-stage datasets. It’s an essential space for innovation, prototyping, and developing a deeper understanding of the available data.

Level Two: Curated and Governed Domain Workspaces

The second level shifts the focus from development to governance. Workspaces here are aligned to business domains such as HR, Finance, Sales, or Operations. They contain curated datasets that have been reviewed, approved, and are ready for wider use.

Key Characteristics

Owned and managed by IT or a central analytics function
Datasets are standardised, documented, and governed
Direct editing is restricted to the data team; business users can consume but not modify
Reports using these datasets can be developed in Level One or Level Three workspaces

This level acts as the organisation’s central source of truth. It reduces duplication by ensuring teams work from a consistent set of definitions and metrics.

Level Three: Executive and Organisation-Wide Reporting

The third level is designed for communication, not development. These workspaces house dashboards and reports created for broad audiences, especially executives and senior leaders.

These reports rely on datasets from Level Two and are designed to be clear, consistent, and fast to load. Many organisations publish these reports through Power BI apps or embed them on intranet pages.

Common Audiences

Executive leadership (CEO, CFO, COO)
Directors of business functions (e.g. HR, Finance, Operations)
People managers (who need access to filtered data on their teams)
Strategic programs and transformation offices

Tips for structuring Power BI to support executive dashboards

Want your executive dashboards to stand the test of time? Here are a few practical tips to design them well and keep them that way.

Design with Purpose

Highlight strategic metrics and trends — not every data point.
Align visuals with organisational goals like financial targets or employee wellbeing.
Use navigation (e.g. bookmarks or buttons) to group content and reduce clutter.
Optimise for mobile — ensure readability on phones and tablets.
Maintain visual consistency across dashboards to build trust.

Maintain with Discipline

Assign dataset owners to manage refreshes and handle issues.
Keep a simple change log so users understand updates.
Create clear channels for feedback, such as forms or Teams integration.
Review access regularly and apply row-level security where needed.

Together, good design and governance ensure your dashboards remain valuable, trusted, and scalable.

Final Thoughts

Power BI enables powerful reporting, but the real strength lies in how your environment is structured. The tiered workspace model helps you bring together data from across the organisation, enforce governance, and deliver clear, consistent insights to decision-makers.

By separating development, governance, and reporting into dedicated layers, you create a sustainable foundation for reporting at scale. Business users can explore, IT can govern, and executives can trust the data they see.

Keep Building: Next Steps and Resources

This tiered Power BI model gives you a strong foundation for consistent, scalable executive reporting. Whether you’re building your first dashboard or improving a legacy setup, take time to align your workspace structure with your organisation’s goals.

Have you used a similar model in your environment? Share your experience in the comments and your lessons could help others avoid common pitfalls and build more effective solutions.

Other Workspace Models to Consider

While the three-level structure works well for many organisations, there are other models that may suit different needs:

Two-Level Model: Combines development and governance into one layer. Best for smaller teams with clear processes and fewer data sources.
Centralised Model: A single IT team handles all reporting and dataset development. Offers consistency, but may reduce agility or domain input.

The best approach depends on your organisation’s size, complexity, and data maturity.

Explore Further

Ready to go deeper? These external resources offer practical tips and examples:

Keep learning, keep refining, and build dashboards that deliver real business impact.