Getting Started with Blueprint

As an executive sponsor, you play an essential role in building a data-driven organization. You and other executive sponsors will set the vision for modern analytics, align projects to transformational initiatives, nominate staff for project and advocacy roles, and ensure accountability. This module provides information to get you started. Welcome!

The executive sponsor plays an essential role in setting the vision for modern analytics. Before deploying Tableau, your organization identified you as an executive sponsor. As an executive sponsor, you play an essential role in building a data-driven organization. You and other executive sponsors will set the vision for modern analytics, align projects to transformational initiatives, nominate staff for project and advocacy roles, and ensure accountability. All executive sponsors will form a cross-functional team that serves as the governing body for your organization's use of Tableau. Perhaps your team is called a steering committee, a council, or an executive committee.

No matter its name, your team will:

Communicate and evangelize your modern analytics vision across the organization.
Represent the interests of your respective departments to establish budget and funding.
Align the use of analytics with strategic initiatives that drive organizational transformation.
Approve Tableau governance processes, policies, guidelines, roles, and responsibilities for managing the organization's data in compliance with business and/or regulatory requirements identified by the project team.
Set the example as visible and vocal users of the platform, using facts over intuition and placing data at the center of every conversation in your respective department meetings.

To succeed, the team will need to understand current/future state capabilities, challenges, and goals. Together, you and the other executive sponsors will work with the project team to set the vision for the next 18 months. This will include regular meetings around project scope, prioritization, success measurement, responses to gathered feedback, and value documentation. To succeed, the team will need to understand current/future state capabilities, challenges, and goals.

Regardless of role, executive sponsors influence adoption. You may be an IT sponsor, an analytics sponsor, or a line-of-business sponsor. The number of executive sponsors and your titles may vary based on the size and scope of your deployment. Responsibilities will vary by role, but you will work together to track the progress of the deployment and to influence your teams to adopt Tableau. IT sponsors are responsible for Tableau installation, configuration, and maintenance. They partner with business leaders and SMEs; enable secure, governed data access; and transition content authoring to business users.

Analytics sponsors
Analytics sponsors implement a modern analytics vision. They ensure availability of data and content, establish education plans/learning paths by job function, facilitate communication among users, and aggregate business value achieved.

Line-of-business sponsors
Line-of-business sponsors advocate for data-driven decision-making within respective teams, promote content authoring and governed data access, encourage collaboration and sharing, and document business value.

The data-driven organization

Everyone within your organization must be empowered to use data to make better decisions. A data-driven culture is defined as the collective behaviors and beliefs of people who value, practice, and encourage the use of data to improve everyday decision making. When everyone within your organization is empowered to use data to make better decisions, your data will achieve its full value.

Traditional business intelligence relied on highly trained technical specialists to make sense of database modeling. This top-down approach meant that insights were outdated by the time they were printed on paper. In contrast, modern analytics enables self-reliance and speed to fresh, actionable insights. With self-service analytics, end users have the freedom to discover and explore pertinent business data that is trusted, secure, and governed.

In modern analytics, IT and business work together. IT creates a centralized environment of secure, trusted data and content and enables all members of an organization to access this data, ask questions, and find the answers they need. Security and data integrity don't come at the expense of agility and innovation. Rather, self-service analytics provides end-users with the freedom to discover and explore pertinent business data that is trusted, secure and governed.

Tableau is the trusted standard in modern analytics, enabling your entire organization to work smarter in a seamless end-to-end experience. Tableau provides powerful and intuitive analytics for users of all skill levels while integrating with your existing technology investments. Its powerful, easy-to-use interface empowers everyone to discover new insights.

Tableau helps people see and understand data. As an executive sponsor, your decisions should support that mission by enabling the development of new skills, creating new behaviors, encouraging participation, and recognizing achievements to alter how your organization uses data every day.

Agility, proficiency, and community are the three core capabilities of every data-driven organization.

As you become a data-driven organization with Tableau, you are not just deploying software; you are driving organizational transformation. Agility, proficiency, and community are the core capabilities at the heart of every data-driven organization. These three capabilities are supported by organizational intent, change management, and trust.

Agility means that the environment is stable and secure, yet can grow and evolve as organizational needs change. Agility is demonstrated in Tableau deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.
Proficiency means that all users in your organization can see and understand data and apply it to everyday decision making. Proficiency is demonstrated in education, measurement, and analytics best practices.
A community can inspire, support learning, and drive excitement around data. Community is demonstrated in communications, engagement, and support.

Tableau Blueprint is the resource for organizational transformation that will help executive sponsors and the project team to efficiently shape your organization's vision for modern analytics. It contains widely used best practices and processes that have been curated and organized to provide step-by-step guidance for becoming a data-driven organization that embodies the three core capabilities: Agility, proficiency, and community. These widely used best practices and processes will support your team in its work to build a data-driven organization where users access secure, governed data and know how to use that data to turn insights into opportunities and innovations.

The Tableau Blueprint framework

The topics within Tableau Blueprint provide concrete plans, recommendations, and guidelines across critical foundational work and three primary work-streams that will turn repeatable processes into the three core capabilities.

Section and sub-section articles structure in Tableau Blueprint

Tableau Blueprint is available online, The section page articles provide informational overviews. For example, the section page article for Analytics Strategy provides a general overview of that concept. Every section contains multiple sub-sections. Sub-section articles provide more granular detail relevant to the topic. Both section and sub-section articles may contain links to additional resources within Tableau. The section and sub-section articles within Tableau Blueprint Overview, Analytics Strategy, and Executive Advocacy and Project Team will be helpful to you as an executive sponsor during the discovery process as you begin driving your organizational transformation.

The Tableau Blueprint process

Build agility, proficiency, and community with a proven, repeatable process. The topics within Tableau Blueprint will guide executive sponsors and the project team through key decision points with a proven, repeatable, four-step process:

Discover: Gather information and perspectives from sponsors and multiple stakeholders about your enterprise architecture, the use of data and analytics among business teams, and analytical skills both present and needed.
Govern: Define controls, roles, and repeatable processes to make the appropriate data and content available to the corresponding audience.
Deploy: Establish the iterative, repeatable processes across the three capability-based major work-streams (agility, proficiency, community) to install and configure software, educate users, and enable communications.
Evolve: Monitor platform utilization, measure user engagement, and host engagement activities to promote and support the growing use of data and analytics.

Your efforts to build agility, proficiency, and community will occur throughout this repeatable process within your governance model.

By linking strategic initiatives to data and analytics, you can use them as a driver of change. Tableau Blueprint also includes the Tableau Blueprint Planner. This is a downloadable planning asset that executive sponsors and the project team will use during the discovery process within your organization's Tableau deployment. Complete the worksheets in the Tableau Blueprint Planner to determine your organization's analytics strategy, including the people, processes, and change management needed to achieve short and long-term goals. The Roles and Responsibilities worksheet in the planner will support you, as an executive sponsor, in the vital first step of forming the cross-functional project team responsible for understanding the capabilities, goals, and challenges of a Tableau deployment.

After using the Roles and Responsibilities worksheet to nominate members of the project team, use the Analytics Strategy worksheet of the Tableau Blueprint Planner to help you define your analytics strategy. The Analytics Strategy worksheet will prompt you to identify your organization's strategic initiatives and KPIs, metrics, or outcomes. By linking these initiatives to data and analytics, you can use them as a driver of change. Next, it will prompt you to document any challenges or risks to the process. Suitable metrics, especially for measuring behavioral changes, should be evaluated at regular intervals as analytics practices evolve. Finally, it will prompt you to establish your Tableau-specific goals.

The other worksheets in the Tableau Blueprint Planner will support your discovery process. As your deployment expands and new use cases and users are identified within departments, revisit the Data and Analytics Survey, Use Cases and Data Sources, and Tableau Users worksheets.