Explore the Core Pillars
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the core pillars of Tableau Blueprint.
- Explain best practices for each stop of Tableau Blueprint.
Why Pillars and Stops?
The journey to scaling the use of your data and analytics doesn’t happen overnight and looks different for every organization. How you apply Tableau Blueprint to your business will vary based on your size, industry, maturity, or other industry-specific factors. But at the heart of every successful data culture are three core capabilities–agility, proficiency, and community–our Tableau Blueprint core pillars. Each pillar includes stopping points, or “stops,” that give you the concrete plans, best practice recommendations, and guidelines you need to customize the journey for your organization.
To see what we mean by “stops,” take a look at the interactivity below. Click each stop to learn more about its key objectives. We take a deeper dive into each pillar and associated stops next.
Working through the stops will help your organization develop the three core capabilities of a successful data-driven company.
Agility Pillar
Let’s start with agility. Your data environment is constantly growing, moving, and changing. Each day, your environment includes additional users, new data, and more content. That’s why you need to deploy and set up your environment in a flexible way that can continue to grow with the needs of the business. It’s also critical to monitor and maintain your environment to ensure it grows and changes accordingly.
As you’ve learned, the agility pillar includes these three key sub-topics, or stops.
- Deployment: Install and configure the software. Define the best way to build, right-size, and secure your environment.
- Monitoring: Be responsive to and scale the use of analytics. Monitor Tableau Server, including hardware and application metrics, to ensure you have the information required to tune your environment as it changes.
- Maintenance: Develop ongoing change management to continue upgrading and evolving. Complete load testing, capacity planning, and upgrades as your organization and environment grow and shift.
Proficiency Pillar
The second core capability is proficiency. For your organization to be successful with data, your users need to know how to use data. Proficiency encompasses data literacy and analytics skills.
Interested in learning more about exploring, interpreting, and communicating effectively with data? Check out the Build Your Data Literacy trail.
Your users must have a baseline understanding of how to see, understand, and apply data to their everyday decision-making. Not everyone needs to become a data rockstar–we know that there will be different levels of analytics expertise within an organization. But, all users still need to know the fundamentals. Here are the three stops of the proficiency pillar.
- Education: Design an education program that teaches people how to use data for their specific job roles at your organization. This education plan can utilize various learning tools—including online videos, eLearning, classroom training, or lunch and learns. A deliberate and dedicated focus on education is an essential step to success.
- Measurement: Measure user utilization, engagement, and adoption. This involves documenting, quantifying, and communicating use cases. Measurement allows environment owners to continue optimizing Tableau, the data, and the content to ensure it's meeting the needs of the business. It also helps you understand how analytics projects contribute to the analytics strategy you defined at the outset.
- Analytics Best Practices: Develop organizational best practices to establish clear guidelines for data use in your organization. These can include templates, color palettes, standards for dashboard design, specific guidelines on calculations, how to interact with the environment, and more.
Community Pillar
A strong internal community drives adoption, engagement, and excitement for data. These data-enthusiasts and experts also alleviate support-pressures from your centralized team. In short, organizations with thriving internal communities are quicker and more successful at building data cultures. The community pillar focuses on these three stops.
- Communications: Establish easy and accessible communication channels to drive adoption, learning, and collaboration—an intranet, newsletter, or Slack channel. With a well-defined communications plan, you can build your user community, nurture the use of data and analytics across all skill levels, and minimize the resources needed to answer common questions.
- Engagement: Design opportunities for your community to engage and collaborate. Promote cross-functional learning and collaboration to get people excited about data. Think about incorporating fun activities, such as internal user groups, Tableau Days, and viz games. These activities can have a tremendous impact and drive excitement and change behavior around data.
- Support: Build processes to support your people. Assist your user community by defining essential resources and paths of support. For example, clearly outline the process for support escalation, and implement this using Slack Workflows. Lastly, don’t forget to encourage your users to use the support channels available in the Tableau Community Forums.
Interested in learning more about building a Slack Workflow? Check out the Slack Workflow Builder module.
So far, you’ve learned that Tableau Blueprint is a methodology for creating a data-driven culture. Each of its pillars includes best practices and detailed, prescriptive documentation describing why it’s important–essentially, what you need to do, and how to do it.
You’ve also learned that Tableau Blueprint is flexible and lets you focus on the specific needs of your company. But where do you begin? How do you prioritize which pillars and stops you focus on? In the next section, you learn about a tool for just that—the Tableau Blueprint Assessment.