Implementing Blueprint for Line-of-Business Sponsors

Leadership and data advocacy

Incorporating data and analytics into decision-making will have the most transformative impact on your organization. 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. Transforming how your company makes decisions every day is no easy task, but incorporating data and analytics into decision-making will have the most transformative impact on your organization. As a line-of-business sponsor, you will lead this effort.

Lead by example
Advocate for data-driven decision making in department meetings, keeping data at the center of every conversation.

Promote engagement
Use best practices to promote content authoring and data access for all users in your organization.

Promote collaboration
Use best practices to promote internal content collaboration and sharing among all users in your organization.

User groups
User groups are a best practice example of ongoing, internal engagement activities.

During the discovery phase, you and other line-of-business sponsors used the Data and Analytics Survey in the Tableau Blueprint Planner to survey your departments/teams. In early stages of adoption, your organization can begin to transition from a centralized governance model to a self-governing governance model if IT provides business users with prepared content to use to make data-driven decisions while they build analytical capabilities. The Data and Analytics Survey in the Tableau Blueprint Planner helped to identify which sources of data are important to departmental job functions and to prioritize which of these data sources would be certified and available at launch.

Users will build analytical capabilities through their individual learning plans. Engagement events will reinforce and accelerate this learning while promoting content authoring and data access. Communications, engagement, and support are the components of community. Engagement is the second component of the core capability of community. Use internal engagement activities to appeal to Tableau users across your organization, regardless of skill level. These activities accelerate and reinforce individual learning and a modern analytics vision. They also promote excitement and collaboration.

The Community worksheet in the Tableau Blueprint Planner will help you to build your Tableau user community in terms of communications, engagement, and support. After completing the worksheet, use Tableau Blueprint to further support engagement planning and to ensure that your organization follows best practices. User groups are a best practice example of ongoing, internal engagement activities. User groups include the Tableau User Group, the Tableau Admin Group, and the Tableau Champions Group.

tableau user group
An internal Tableau User Group provides a formal structure for a community of users to learn, share, and collaborate. Of the three user group types, this group provides the best forum for promoting collaboration and sharing among Tableau user teams.

Work with community leaders on the project team to create an internal Tableau User Group.

The Tableau User group meets at a regular, recurring monthly time. Community leaders promote it on your organization's enablement intranet and invite every Tableau user to participate, regardless of skill level. If possible, meetings should be recorded, and an archive should be posted on the enablement intranet for on-demand consumption.
In general, Tableau User Group meetings last one hour and include formal skill development, success sharing, content announcements and recognition, and open feedback.
Attendance will depend on relevant topics appearing on the agenda. Use information from the Tableau Users and the Data and Analytics Survey worksheets in the Tableau Blueprint Planner to provide guidance on skills that need development.
In addition to a formal monthly Tableau User Group, schedule an informal monthly lunch-and-learn meeting to allow users to meet, eat, and learn together.

You can find a quick-start kit to help your project team prepare to launch your internal Tableau User Group in the Tableau Community Toolkit, which you can access from the Peer-to-Peer Assistance article under Tableau Support Processes in Tableau Blueprint.

tableau admin group
In addition to participating in the Tableau User Group, Tableau server and site administrators should attend a formal, structured, monthly meeting.

At Tableau Admin Group meetings, administrators will share ideas and challenges, discuss how to communicate changes, and, in the case of multiple server instances, coordinate standards and upgrades.
In general, Tableau Admin Group meetings last one hour and include server utilization review, content utilization review, and open feedback.

tableau champions group
As an executive sponsor, you have a good sense of the people in your organization who are passionate about analytics and are motivated to help their peers to see and understand data. You likely identified many of these people when completing the Roles and Responsibilities and Tableau Users worksheets in the Tableau Blueprint Planner. You can continue to work with the project team to identify additional people who consistently demonstrate the following characteristics:

Leadership and evangelism: Champions represent the Tableau community through inclusivity and kindness, and they model good behavior.
Knowledge and advocacy: Champions understand the Tableau platform, company, and/or community, and they maintain an active presence in the community.
Responsiveness and accessibility: Champions regularly respond to and engage with others around the use of Tableau, and they collaborate and contribute to Tableau projects whenever possible.

Work with community leaders on the project team to create a Champions Group to recognize these leaders. At Champions Group meetings, members will share their first-hand observations of Tableau user behavior throughout the organization in order to support the design of appropriate organization-wide enablement opportunities.

Other engagement activities
Engagement events promote content and data access and foster collaboration. In addition to Tableau User groups, engagement events are another best practice example of engagement activities. They promote content and data access and foster collaboration. These events should include something for everyone by providing exciting, motivating opportunities for users across skill levels to engage with Tableau. Engagement events can be hosted internally or accessed externally. Many organizations enjoy a combination of internal and external engagement events. Work with community leaders on your project team to plan engagement events. Tableau Blueprint will support you as you plan internal engagement events and will direct you to resources for external engagement events, ensuring your organization follows best practices.

tableau viz games
An internal engagement event, Tableau Viz Games will generate excitement and motivate engagement. These visualization competitions can be held fully online or in person, depending on available resources. In-person contests can be exciting because contestants compete live and against the clock. Online contests are easier to coordinate and give contestants a longer period of time to create their visualizations. You can also combine these methods. For example, Iron Viz, a viz games competition held at Tableau Conference, utilizes an online format to determine finalists before its live, in-person, timed final round.

The workflow for creating a Viz Games event starts with choosing a theme, such as a particular topic, data set, chart/dashboard type, or feature. As an executive sponsor, you can also choose to tie the contest to a business problem or other strategic initiative. Whatever you choose, issue a challenge, a prepared data set, and a deadline.
You can choose to have contestants enter individually, or you can allow for cross-functional teams to form. You will also need an internal judging panel with sufficient diversity and expertise who can evaluate entries based on analysis, storytelling, and design. In addition to grand prizes, be creative in recognizing contestants for a variety of honorable mentions. For example, give prizes for clean design, originality, little-known insights, and the like. You can find a quick-start kit to help you plan your internal Tableau Viz Games event in the Tableau Community Toolkit, which you can access from the Peer-to-Peer Assistance article under Tableau Support Processes in Tableau Blueprint.

tableau day
Host a Tableau Day, an annual or semi-annual internal engagement event, to make data and analytics more visible in your organization. This mini-conference format can contain keynote speeches, break-out sessions, and other types of presentations. Invite people from your organization to present their work and insights, coordinate with other executive sponsors to present achievements you've documented on strategic initiatives, and celebrate your ongoing organizational transformation! Tableau can also provide your organization with speakers to lead your Tableau Day participants with demonstrations, hands-on training, and Q & A sessions. Having Tableau resources at your Tableau Day will boost attendance and engagement. An engaged, robust Tableau Day audience will apply what they learn to keep your organization’s momentum building. You can work with your Tableau account representative to create a Tableau Day that fits your organizational needs.

external tableau activities
In addition to designing Tableau activities within your organization, make sure users are aware of external opportunities to engage with Tableau. Links on your enablement intranet can encourage users to participate in a variety of activities organized by Tableau or by the external Tableau Community.

In-person external opportunities
include Tableau Conference, Tableau Roadshows, and Area Tableau User Groups.

Users can also enjoy online experiences such as Virtual Tableau User Groups, Tableau Community Forums, and the fun Tableau Community-hosted activities: Makeover Monday, Workout Wednesday, and Sports Viz Sunday. All of these experiences will deepen and reinforce Tableau skills and build user motivation and excitement. You can access a full list of scheduled external events from the Tableau website homepage, under Community. Publish this link on your enablement intranet and promote participation.

Peer-to-peer internal support
Encourage collaboration and sharing with peer-to-peer internal support. Support is the third component of the core capability of community. Use a variety of interactions to support your user community, encourage collaboration and sharing, and remove the obstacles to using data and analytics effectively. As a line-of-business sponsor, you can work with the project team to ensure that all Tableau users within your organization have access to the help they need.

The Community worksheet in the Tableau Blueprint Planner will help you to build your Tableau user community in terms of communications, engagement, and support. After completing the worksheet, use Tableau Blueprint for further planning around user support to ensure your organization follows best practices. Best practices include peer-to-peer internal support, such as Tableau Champion development and Tableau Data Doctor.

tableau champion development
Tableau Champions can positively impact adoption and engagement organization-wide. Champions will need to be developed, and a development process will need to be in place. After creating a process to develop Champions, deploy them as mentors throughout your organization. These mentors can serve as embedded resources within teams and departments, formally training new users when Tableau is onboarded. They can also serve as resources within departments by introducing data sources and by providing informal ad hoc training to help users build their Tableau skills.

tableau data doctor
This peer-to-peer assistance resource connects advanced Tableau users within your organization with users facing a challenge or a question for one-on-one support and training in a clinic-style setting. Your Tableau Data Doctor practice can utilize scheduled appointments, drop-in appointments, or both, and its roles will be staffed by Tableau experts from your organization, led by a chief of staff, and will utilize doctors, an attending physician, a unit coordinator, and other supporting roles as necessary.

Tableau Data Doctor also helps organizations to identify knowledge gaps within the organization so as to make better decisions around needed training and engagement activities. Tableau provides the Data Doctor Implementation Guide, a toolkit of best practices and other resources to use in your organization’s Tableau Data Doctor practice. You can find it in the Tableau Community Toolkit, which you can access from the Peer-to-Peer Assistance article under Tableau Support Processes in Tableau Blueprint. It includes several topics relevant to implementing an internal Tableau Data Doctor practice.

Practice design
The Data Doctor toolkit will help you to identify your business needs, the change you want to make (or goal), and how you will measure success (metrics). It will also help you to assess your organizational culture to determine the use of scheduled appointment times or open office hours, and to determine the use of themed or free- form appointment topics.

Technology planning
In addition to Tableau, you will need technology solutions for appointment scheduling, data collection on ailments treated, and skills assessments to select staff for the practice. The Data Doctor toolkit provides information and recommendations.

Location and experience planning
The Data Doctor toolkit provides location requirements based on the size of your practice. It also provides an overview of all the roles within a Data Doctor practice based on the size of your practice, from a chief of staff (lead organizer) to the front desk (flow and operations manager) with recommendations regarding each role's Tableau skill level.

Practice promotion and running day one
The Data Doctor toolkit provides advice for promoting the practice and ensuring a successful first day.

Additional resources
The toolkit contains downloadable assets in its appendix to support the topics listed above.

Specific LOB KPIs

Administrative views can support specific LOB KPIs. Specific LOB KPIs may include:

Determining percentage of users within a team trained.
Determining amount of content published.
Determining user login frequency, days since last login, and users who logged in once and didn't return.

To determine the percentage of users trained within a team, revisit the Data and Analytics Skills worksheet in the Tableau Blueprint Planner and document the evolution of users' analytical skills within your team or department. To determine the amount of published content and to measure engagement via login behavior, work with server or site administrations around pre-built and custom administrative views on Tableau Server.

Pre-built administrative views

Default (pre-built) administrative views are dashboards included with Tableau Server to help administrators optimize Tableau Server and to better understand how users are interacting with Tableau content. Some views that will help you to meet specific LOB sponsor KPIs include:

Actions by all users: Use to understand site activity and see actions for all users, including:
Access and Interactions: See login activity, view access, and data source use.
Publish and Download: See publishing and downloading of flows, workbooks, and data sources.
Subscriptions: See counts of subscription email sent for workbooks and views. Also see the counts of flow runs.
Actions by a specific user: Includes items used.
Actions by recent users: Includes last action and idle times.

Custom Administrative Views
Use custom administrative views for deeper analysis of user behaviors and organization-specific KPIs. Use the default administrative views workbook as a starting point and customize existing dashboards. Use published/extracted community data sources to perform deeper analysis on your deployment. These data sources, packaged as workbooks, are downloadable assets on Tableau Community Forums. After downloading the workbooks, point them at the repository database on Tableau Server, and publish them as data sources. Data sources that will help you to meet specific LOB sponsor KPIs include:

TS Content: High-level summarized data for each view, workbook, flow, and published data source on Tableau Server
TS Users: Aggregated information on user behavior on Tableau Server

See the Administrative Views article under Tableau Monitoring in Tableau Blueprint for a link to the community forum post containing these data sources as well as other information, best practices, and resources to support the use of administrative views.

Using Administrative Views
You can use either the pre-built Actions by All Users view and/or a customized version to begin measuring engagement via login behavior:

Determine users who have not logged in.
Determine users who logged in once but never returned.
Determine days since users' last logins.