4 lessons learned from growing modern analytics in the enterprise

This year I participated in the selection process for customer speaking sessions for Tableau Conference (Have you registered? Tickets are going fast!) and I was blown away by the growth stories and learnings that our customers plan to share in New Orleans. I was expecting more presentations around optimizing dashboard performance or exciting new analyses that can impact an organization’s bottom line, but was surprised by a different, common thread running through many of the applications: overcoming challenges to scale modern analytics across the enterprise.

Unlike the more traditional business intelligence systems, modern BI platforms like Tableau are designed to bring analytics to everyone. But this clearly comes with a lot of challenges—many of which occur outside the technology itself—and require a lot of collaboration and creativity to champion. From communicating the impact of analytics to building an internal community, the change management and adoption hurdles that come with scaling modern analytics are pains felt by many of our customers—especially those involved in the organization’s analytics center of excellence.

The good news is that the Tableau Community is a never-ending source of inspiration to help you over these hurdles in your efforts to grow your modern analytics deployments and transform your organization with data-driven decision making. Let’s look at a few incredible lessons learned by enterprise customers as they’ve grown their Tableau deployments and brought modern analytics to more employees.

As Charles Schwab's Tableau administrator, Gessica Briggs-Sullivan transformed the COE's model with increased transparency and more broadly offered Tableau licenses. Her team encouraged a growing internal user community with a dedicated SharePoint portal that included tips, facilitated discussions, and hosted helpful resources. The COE also created a series of dashboards for people to track data about their dashboards, including load times, extract failures, and usage metrics. With greater access to visual analytics and support, Tableau users have increased from 6,000 to more than 16,000.

Read the complete story to learn more.

Brown-Forman’s analytics center of excellence is headed by Commercial Finance with input from the CFO as well as CIO, Tim Nall. Acting as the driver for the organization’s strategy, the COE has partnered with IT and established clear roles involved in rolling out new data sources to the entire organization with the proper deployment processes, governance, and security. “You could say that this center of excellence was a block in our pyramid that always needed to be there,” Tim shared.

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At REI, executives have taken notice of the impact of data analysis and recognize that enterprise-wide adoption is vital to keeping a pulse on both strategic initiatives and daily operations. To ensure continued success with analytics and nurture collaboration between IT and the business, teams to commit to the following five measures:

1. Co-locating to build trust and engage face-to-face
2. Holding a monthly IT and business leadership meeting to communicate more openly
3. Distributing weekly project updates
4. Scheduling a collaborative requirement gathering to better understand needs
5. Staying true to holding regular one-on-one meetings

Clinton Fowler, Director of Customer and Advanced Analytics, said, “I think Tableau is at the forefront of shaping a culture of analytics at REI.”

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The IT-led COE team at JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) played an important role with adoption and continues to set the vision for Tableau and analytics use across JPMC. Eight individuals not only trained 1,200 new developers and analysts on the platform throughout all of 2017, but instituted “Tableau Days”—full-day sessions that include what Steven Hittle, Vice President and BI Innovation Leader, refers to as “data therapy sessions.” His team helps users improve dashboard performance, provides best practices for calculations, and helps educate the business on “how to do data differently.” With grassroots momentum and sparked interest in data, JPMC now has nearly 30,000 Tableau users.

Read the complete story to learn more.

Here’s a handful of exciting examples of customer stories you can expect at TC18—view the full list of sessions for more!

• Cisco: Data-driven culture beyond business intelligence
• Data to decision part 2: Organizational change at Nationwide Insurance
• Deutsche Bank’s Tableau centre of practice: Enabling for today, empowering for tomorrow
• Expedia: Big data self-service analytics with Tableau and AWS
• McKesson Corporation: Creating a user-determined analytics experience
• Powering Boeing’s second century with actionable insights
• Tableau at scale: Driving community and embedding dashboards globally for PepsiCo

Between the on-stage presentations and the networking opportunities with industry professionals and Tableau experts, you’re guaranteed to leave Tableau Conference with powerful new ideas to make your analytics practices more successful at scale.

We can’t wait to see you in New Orleans! Register for TC18 today.