Tableau Blueprint Help

Before you deploy Tableau, you should identify executive sponsors. The executive sponsors set the vision for modern analytics, align projects to transformational initiatives, nominate staff for project and advocacy roles, and ensure accountability. They will serve as the governing body for the use of Tableau. The executive sponsors may also be known as a Tableau Steering Committee, Tableau Council, or Analytics Executive Committee. Whatever name you choose, this cross-functional executive team will:

• Communicate and sell the vision for modern analytics across the organization.
• Represent the interests of their 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 of using facts over intuition by placing data at the center of every conversation in their department meetings as a visible and vocal user of the platform.

 

Given the diversity of use cases that arise within a company-wide initiative, the best way to monitor progress is to evaluate how deeply data is ingrained in the day-to-day activities of the organization and how it impacts business decisions. KPIs may include the following: percentage of leadership engagement with Tableau content, such as content linked to strategic initiatives; using analytics to run meetings; and measures of department/team performance.

Initially, monthly meetings should be held to track the progress of the deployment and influence their teams to adopt Tableau. After an operational routine is achieved, meetings can transition to a quarterly cadence.

Depending on the size and scope of the deployment, the number of executive sponsors and titles (C-level, VP, etc.) may vary. Potential members of the executive steering committee are shown below.

 

Note: Depending on your organizational structure, the Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO) or Chief Data Office (CDO) role and roles reporting into it may reside under IT.

 

Executive Sponsor Role	Responsibilities
IT Sponsor	The IT Sponsor (CIO/CTO) is responsible for Tableau installation, configuration, and maintenance, partners with business leaders and SMEs, enables secure, governed data access, and transitions content authoring to business users. Specific IT KPIs may include the following: percentage of content authored by business users vs. IT, percentage of data being available vs. analyzed.
Analytics Sponsor	The Analytics Sponsor (CDO) implements the vision for modern analytics, ensures the availability of data and content, establishes education plans and learning paths by organizational job functions, facilitates communication throughout the user community, and aggregates business value achieved. Specific analytics KPIs may include the following: percentage of all users trained, such as analytics skills in organization, percentage of users who increased analytical skills.
Line-of-Business Sponsors	Line-of-Business Sponsors (CFO, CMO, etc.) advocate for data-driven decision-making within their respective teams, promote content authoring and governed data access, encourage collaboration and sharing, and document business value. Specific LOB KPIs may include the following: percentage of users within a team trained, amount of content published, user login frequency, days since last login, users who logged in once and didn’t return.