A Repeatable Process for Tableau Blueprint

This content is part of Tableau Blueprint—a maturity framework allowing you to zoom in and improve how your organization uses data to drive impact. To begin your journey, take our assessment(Link opens in a new window).

Tableau Blueprint is a step-by-step guide to becoming a data-driven organization. It provides concrete plans, recommendations, and guidelines across critical foundational work and three primary workstreams that will turn repeatable processes into core capabilities. These topics will guide you through key decision points with a proven, repeatable, four-step process:

  1. 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.
  2. Govern — Define controls, roles, and repeatable processes to make the appropriate data and content available to the corresponding audience. 
  3. Deploy — Establish the iterative, repeatable processes across the three major workstreams to install and configure software, educate users, and enable communications.
  4. Evolve — Monitor platform utilization, measure user engagement, and host engagement activities to promote and support the growing use of data and analytics.

For existing deployments, use this blueprint to assess your current capabilities—including where you are excelling and where there are areas for growth and improvement.

Step 1: Discover

Tableau Blueprint includes the Tableau Blueprint Assessment and the Tableau Blueprint Planner.

Designed with Data Culture and analytics best practices in mind, The Tableau Blueprint Assessment helps you navigate the journey to becoming a data-driven organization by measuring where you are and providing personalized, actionable recommendations on where to go from here. It establishes your baseline, measuring where you are in your journey to becoming data-driven. Your assessment results will include actionable recommendations and best-practice examples. You can revisit and update your results any time to see how you progress over time.

The Tableau Blueprint Planner is a comprehensive planning asset that will help you systematically gather the right information needed to link data with your strategic initiatives, define your analytics strategy, discover analytics and predictions use cases, and assemble the Executive Sponsor Roles and Responsibilities and Tableau Project Team Roles and Responsibilities. This will ensure you are evaluating the needs of the organization holistically, so you can scope a vision and strategy that will suit your entire organization and grow with you over time. After completing discovery, you should have a greater sense of the direction you are headed with your analytics strategy and the roles needed to execute on it. Discovery should be revisited as you expand to new users and use cases, but having a clear view of the future state will help you make decisions as you move forward.

Step 2: Govern

As mentioned above, a clear approach to governance is a pivotal point in the process and must be addressed early. Governance is pervasive throughout every workstream. The time invested up front to collaboratively define governance gives people confidence to trust the data, use it responsibly, and participate in the processes that surround it. Tableau Governance covers all aspects of governance in Tableau and helps you determine the best approach for your teams, data, and content. Working through the areas within data and content governance, you will define standards, policies, and roles who perform the corresponding actions and processes in the governance models.

Step 3: Deploy

To scale analytics across the organization with confidence, you need repeatable, iterative processes in the deploy stage as you execute on your analytics strategy. During the initial deployment, there needs be coordination among the cross-functional team members to install, integrate, and configure the Tableau platform, educate users, and provide organization-specific enablement resources. After the initial deployment, you will onboard new teams and use cases with education and communication. If you have already completed the Tableau Blueprint Assessment, this is where you implement the assessment recommendations you've prioritized.

Step 4: Evolve

Your analytics strategy needs to keep pace with the growth of users, skillsets, and use cases across the organization. As processes evolve into capabilities, your users will adopt modern analytics, and you will adapt your operating models by delegating more responsibilities over time. The project team has access to several sources of information and data to tailor and tune your analytics environment to changing business needs. The project team will be responsive to the growing use of data and analytics among a diverse set of users by establishing a feedback loop to monitor and measure key metrics, including the business value achieved. Consider revisiting the Tableau Blueprint Assessment and the Tableau Blueprint Planner.

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