Cornell Case Study Recap in Campus Technology

Linda Briggs, writing for Campus Technology, recently interviewed Cindy Sedlacek of Cornell University regarding Cornell's deployment of Tableau Software. Campus Technology published Briggs' detailed case study of what Sedlacek and her team accomplished with Tableau at Cornell. Check out the article.

I've personally been lucky to hear about Cornell's experiences directly from Cindy. So it's nice to see the story in print. But the reason I wanted to blog on it is because the case study has some great insights focused on the challenges of implementing business intelligence (BI) tools and then getting business people to use it. Key take-aways seem to be:

• Deploy tools that are so easy to use that they don't require training - your users (especially executive users) won't have time.
• Traditional BI tools are not the answer for widescale, business-user deployment.
• BI already in place can be used as high-end tools for trained staff.
• Focus on the data - not the tool. Cindy estimates they used to spend 90% of their time on the tool and only 10% on analysis. That ratio has flipped now with Tableau.

Again, check out the whole article for all the details.