A Beginners Guide to Tableau Blueprint
Imagine your organization gaining insights with intention and involvement, understanding information with business context, and making evidence-based decisions. Imagine using data to unleash the potential of your people.
At an organization like this, employees are self-enabled, with the ability to continuously consume data and make decisions immediately, at the speed of business. This is data literacy, the key to delivering better business outcomes.
Despite a desire for this in all organizations, Gartner’s Chief Data Officer Survey shows that 35% of CDOs listed “poor data literacy” as a roadblock to success.
This is where a tool like Tableau can help. But, having the tool to “harness the power of your data” and actually doing it are two very different things.
Maybe you want to achieve data literacy and gain powerful insights across your organization, but you don’t know how to get there. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a step by step guide from experts on how to successfully implement Tableau and become data-driven?
You need a list of tangible and specific actions to take. Tableau Blueprint provides that. Whether you’re new to Tableau or you’ve already deployed Tableau, Blueprint can help deepen and scale the use of data in your organization.
Here’s an overview of how Blueprint can help:
What is Blueprint?
Blueprint is based around three core capabilities of data-driven organizations:
- Analytics proficiency of users
- An agile deployment that can evolve and grow over time to meet the needs of the organization
- An internal user community to drive engagement and adoption
These three core capabilities were put into a Subway Map visual, showing each of the topics an organization needs to think about to successfully enable Tableau at scale. Combined, this creates a 4-step process to guide you through key decision points along your journey.
The 4 steps of Tableau Blueprint
Step One: Discover
To truly achieve a data culture, start with your people.
In step one, Blueprint guides you in creating an analytics strategy and identifying the right team to help execute the strategy. You’ll ask questions about the organization's enterprise architecture, the use of data analytics among teams, the resources available and the skill sets present and needed throughout the organization.
Here, you can use the Tableau Blueprint Planner to ensure you holistically evaluate the needs of your organization. Completing the Discover phase should give you a better understanding of your analytics strategy moving forward and the people needed to make it happen.
Step Two: Govern
Give people with subject matter knowledge access to trusted and governed data to make decisions.
The Govern step focuses on defining roles, responsibilities and processes. By setting up this governance, you will build trust and confidence in data and analytics.
You want to ensure the correct audiences can access appropriate data. Working through the Govern step, you should define standards and identify who will perform the necessary roles.
Taking the time to focus on this step early in the process will create a mindset in your organization to trust the data and use it responsibly.
Step Three: Deploy
Driving change across your organization requires coordination and alignment. The deploy stage focuses on creating repeatable processes as you execute your strategy.
This includes configuring the Tableau platform, educating users, and providing specific enablement resources for your organization. By creating a trusted environment, setting up a monitoring system and strategy for maintaining the environment, you ensure you have a strong foundation in place.
When you onboard new teams and use cases, after the initial deployment, you will be prepared with education and communication.
Step Four: Evolve
By continuously educating your team, measuring usage and determining best practices, you begin to achieve data literacy.
The Evolve step is all about supporting the growth of data and analytics in your organization. Your analytics strategy must keep up as your skills and organization use cases evolve.
As you chart your course to becoming a data-driven organization with Tableau, it’s important to remember that you are not just deploying software—you are driving organizational transformation by prioritizing facts over intuition with data at the center of every conversation.
Your decisions should not only give people the right tools, but they must also enable the development of new skills, create new behaviors, encourage participation, and recognize achievements to alter how the organization uses data every day.
It’s Never Too Late to Invest in Data
Companies fail to significantly invest in data. A 2019 Big Data and AI Executive Survey finds that 69% of executives from large companies report they have not created a data-driven organization.
When these leaders were asked why, 93% of respondents stated that people and process issues are the obstacles to successful adoption. Tableau Blueprint helps solve those issues with step-by-step instructions to support your organization through deployment, expansion, and evolution.
Onebridge is uniquely positioned as a Tableau partner, serving as an extension to those teams to enable you to achieve better insights from your data. Tableau is a trusted leader in modern analytics and business intelligence. Tableau has been recognized as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant of BI and Analytics for six consecutive years and is the most reviewed analytics platform on Gartner Peer Insights.
Together, we recognize the challenge you face in creating a data-driven mindset across your organization. We know how to empower your teams to harness the power in your data with Tableau – contact us today to learn more.
