As per the Power BI deployment modes section of Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects, some organizations may choose to empower certain business users to create and manage the visualization layer (Self-Service Visualization). This hybrid approach gives business users more flexibility to address rapidly changing analytical needs, yet leverages IT-supported and validated data sources and resources. When even greater business user flexibility is required, or when IT resources are not available, the Self-Service BI mode can be implemented via Power BI Pro licenses and an app workspace.

In the Self-Service BI deployment model, several business users (for example, five to ten) who regularly collaborate within a team or department are assigned Power BI Pro licenses. One of these users then creates an app workspace in the Power BI service and adds the other users who've been assigned Pro licenses as members with edit rights. The BI/IT team would typically require that at least one member of the BI organization be added as a workspace administrator. Additionally, if applicable, the BI/IT team would authorize a few business users in the workspace to utilize an On-premises data gateway for their required data sources.