Ashok Kumar

Microsoft BI platform administrator with 15+ years in business intelligence, data warehousing, and reporting, including 9+ years administering enterprise-scale Power BI environments and 3+ years running Microsoft Fabric workloads. Day-to-day ownership of tenant administration, workspace governance, Premium and Fabric capacity management, gateway infrastructure, and security administration across Development, Test, Pre-Production, and Production. Hands-on with SQL Server administration, Azure DevOps CI/CD, Git integration, and PowerShell automation.

Works directly with Data Engineering, Infrastructure, Information Security, and business stakeholders, and acts as escalation point for complex platform issues.

Power BI & Fabric Platform Lead — Architect / Administrator - Estée Lauder Companies

(2017-04)

• Tenant Administration & Workspace Governance
• Administer the enterprise Power BI tenant end to end: tenant settings, workspace provisioning and lifecycle, naming standards, content certification and promotion, app distribution, and decommissioning of orphaned content.
• Own report and semantic model deployment across Development, Test, Pre-Production, and Production using Power BI deployment pipelines, including release scheduling, environment refreshes, and post-deployment validation.
• Authored and maintain the governance standards the platform runs on — workspace lifecycle policy, certification criteria, tenant setting baselines, and DAX/M development standards.
• Stood up and administer Fabric workloads including OneLake, Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Data Factory pipelines, and Direct Lake semantic models.
• Manage Power BI Premium and Fabric capacities: monitor utilization through the Capacity Metrics App, size and plan capacity, configure autoscale, place workloads, and diagnose and resolve throttling and overload conditions.
• Led the Premium-to-Fabric migration strategy, covering SKU sizing, workload placement, item migration sequencing, and production cutover with no loss of reporting service.
• Consolidated a duplicated reporting estate onto Fabric, cutting data redundancy roughly 40% through OneLake shortcuts and improving report performance roughly 60% using Direct Lake connectivity; recognized internally for the work.
• Security Administration
• Administer Row-Level and Object-Level Security, workspace roles, external sharing controls, and Microsoft Entra ID security groups and service principals used for API and scheduled-refresh access.
• Partner with Information Security on data protection, sensitivity labeling, audit log review, access recertification, and compliance reporting for the analytics platform.
• Maintain lineage and metadata documentation so dataset dependencies and downstream impact are known before any release.
• Install, configure, upgrade, and troubleshoot On-Premises Data Gateways in clustered configurations for high availability across non-production and production estates.
• Manage gateway data source registrations and credential rotation; resolve connectivity and authentication failures against SQL Server, Databricks, SAP HANA, Oracle, and Dataverse.
• CI/CD & Automation
• Built CI/CD for Power BI and Fabric artifacts using Azure DevOps, Git integration, and deployment pipelines, giving versioned, repeatable, reviewable releases.
• Automate tenant administration with PowerShell and the Power BI and Fabric REST APIs — workspace provisioning, permission audits, capacity and usage reporting, and stale content cleanup — removing a large share of manual admin effort.
• Configured service-principal-based scheduling through Power Automate so report delivery could be driven from outside the Power BI service.
• Monitoring, Incident Response & Performance
• Monitor platform health and refresh reliability, investigate incidents affecting business-critical reporting, perform root cause analysis, and drive fixes through to closure; incidents tracked in ServiceNow and Jira.
• Built operational dashboards covering capacity utilization, refresh failures, workspace inventory, usage analytics, and adoption trends.
• Tune semantic models and reports using DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, and Bravo; apply incremental refresh, aggregations, and composite models to balance DirectQuery and Import workloads.
• Act as senior platform administrator: review platform configurations, troubleshoot escalations, mentor BI developers and junior administrators, and run workshops on new Power BI and Fabric releases.
• Work with Data Engineering on enterprise semantic models and Fabric workloads sourced from Databricks and SQL Server.
• Document platform standards, administration runbooks, governance policies, and deployment procedures.

Sr. Manager, Data & Analytics — BI Platform Administration - MillerCoors

(2013-08 - 2017-04)

• Administered the enterprise Power BI Service rollout alongside the incumbent SAP BusinessObjects estate, covering workspace configuration, content deployment, and capacity and resource allocation.
• Controlled user access and permissions in line with corporate security policy; onboarded new users, managed role assignments, and handled access reviews.
• Monitored usage metrics to tune the environment, retire unused content, and target adoption effort where it paid off.
• Ran regular performance tuning and troubleshooting of reports and datasets, working with data engineering to reshape underlying models.
• Implemented data governance policies and established the documentation standard for BI processes, deployments, and platform configuration.
• Gathered requirements from business stakeholders and translated them into supportable reporting solutions; coordinated cross-functional delivery of BI projects on schedule.
• Provided user training and support on platform functionality and best practices.

Manager, BI Platforms (SQL Server, SSRS/SSAS/SSIS, SAP BW, BOBJ, HANA) - EMC

(2010-04 - 2013-08)

• Owned ongoing maintenance and change management of the enterprise BI platform, advising IT on configuration and upgrade recommendations.
• Performed SQL Server administration: created and maintained database objects, tuned T-SQL and indexing, managed backup and restore, and migrated large reporting databases across SQL Server versions with minimal user impact.
• Led migration from legacy on-premises report servers to a consolidated reporting platform with phased cutovers, automated rollback, and full documentation — delivered within SLA with no production data loss.
• Built automated deployment pipelines for report artifacts using PowerShell, TFS, and REST APIs, introducing version control and repeatable deployments.
• Created and maintained performance tuning playbooks for SSRS, SSAS, and SSIS; reduced average report load time by 40% through indexing, cube processing optimization, and report redesign.
• Implemented RBAC automation that cut manual provisioning time by 70% and eliminated entitlement drift.
• Designed an automated monitoring and alerting system that flagged capacity problems early and prevented two major outages.
• Deployed and validated releases across Integration, Functional, UAT, and Production; coordinated production schedules with the development team.
• Integrated web services and REST APIs for data ingestion and hybrid authentication; built low-code request and approval flows for report provisioning.
• Trained 50+ analysts and applicat