Tableau Blueprint Help

People are using data every day in their personal lives to make better decisions—from what route to take, to monitoring diet and exercise, and managing the personal budget. Think about that—almost everybody uses some kind of data already to gain efficiency, measure progress, and modify behaviors for better individual outcomes, whether they consciously realize it or not.

But making data ubiquitous in your organization or team is not so easy. You have to deeply understand where people need data and how they will use it, then make the relevant data accessible at those moments. Everyone says that they would like to be a data-driven organization, but the reality is that most companies are still in the early stages of modern data and analytics adoption.

With its prescriptive, proven, and repeatable processes, Tableau Blueprint curates the best practices and expertise of thousands of customers to help you, your team, and your organization become more data-driven. You will find a summary of the methodology in the Tableau Blueprint Overview topic, which we recommend for everyone to understand.

Depending on the scope, size, and maturity of your initiative, specific areas of Tableau Blueprint are more appropriate for your specific requirements. This topic provides relevant starting points for organizations, teams, and individuals.

Organizations

For most organizations, it is rare to begin with a clean slate. Likely, you’ll find numerous existing ways of distributing and consuming data: some designated analysts who create reports for others, people using different business intelligence platforms and tools, the movement of data from governed systems of record to ungoverned methods for downstream analysis, and/or pockets of Tableau scattered across different teams that have grown separately over time.

The discovery process outlined in Tableau Blueprint will help you gather valuable perspectives from across the organization to define your Analytics Strategy with the Tableau Blueprint Planner. This downloadable resource steps through the questions to ask, the plans to make, and the steps to take, helping you to accelerate your timeline for deploying with agility, building analytics proficiency, and creating an analytics community, while avoiding the common pitfalls that are encountered with trial and error alone. You will define Governance in Tableau to enable access to trusted data.

The better you understand your organization’s requirements, the better you can proactively support the growth of analytics and the broad use of trusted and governed data. For both new and existing deployments, understanding the current state is the critical first step in developing your broader roll-out plan. This will help drive towards organizational alignment and identify the roles and responsibilities for the Executive Advocacy and Project Team to support the initiative from its beginnings through the planned expansion to users of all skill levels in your company.

The Tableau Blueprint Assessment helps you navigate the journey to becoming a data-driven organization by measuring where you are and providing actionable recommendations on where to go from here. This assessment was designed with Data Culture and analytics best practices in mind, and anyone can take it for free. We recommend having multiple stakeholders take the assessment. Check out the Tableau Blueprint Toolkit for templates you can use to inform and invite your colleagues to take the Tableau Blueprint Assessment.

Whether your organization is new to modern analytics or you’ve already deployed and need to broaden, deepen, and scale the use of data, Tableau Blueprint allows you to zoom out to see the big picture of what’s ahead, and it allows you to zoom in on a specific area to fine tune and improve at any point along your journey.

Teams

For smaller teams or workgroups that are not part of a company-wide initiative, it is important to understand how data is used today and what analytical skills exist among your people. Your initial focus will be on identifying and prioritizing content, curating trusted and governed data sources, authoring impactful dashboards, creating models and deploying predictions, and building new skills.

Within the Tableau Blueprint Planner, you will find the Tableau Data and Analytics Survey and Tableau Use Cases and Data Sources tabs to help you gather information you need to begin. They’re also a great place to start if you are working towards proving value and obtaining executive sponsorship for a broader organization-wide effort. Governance in Tableau will help you establish a flexible, yet defined governance framework and right-size it for your unique requirements in Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.

At the same time, building data literacy and growing analytical skills through education will be needed. The Skills by Tableau Education Role, Skills by Tableau License Type, and Developing a Tableau Education Plan topics will help your team build proficiency.

For teams from large to small, start meeting together to share your knowledge and insights. This will be the beginning of your Internal Tableau Activities. In addition, you should encourage your team to join the Tableau Community and participate in a thriving, global network of data enthusiasts. For more information, see External Tableau Activities from regional and virtual Tableau User Groups to the annual Tableau Conference.

The Tableau Blueprint Assessment can also be beneficial for teams by helping to gauge where you are in your journey to becoming data-driven and providing actionable recommendations and links to documentation.

Individuals

Individuals will benefit from the prescriptive learning paths defined in Skills by Tableau Education Role, such as Designer, Analyst, Data Scientist and Business Scientist, and Developer. Tableau Blueprint also provides a view of skills by license in the Skills by Tableau License Type topic.

The Analytics Best Practices in Tableau topic provides guidelines, standards, and processes for the discovery, interpretation, and presentation of data. This will help you understand The Cycle of Visual Analysis and how to apply it to your data.

You should join the Tableau Community and participate in a thriving, global network of data enthusiasts. For more information, see External Tableau Activities from regional to virtual activities to the annual Tableau Conference.