Tableau Blueprint: The Hammer and Nail Edition

welcome and we're excited you are here to hear about the tableau blueprint hammer and nails edition my name is Michael Cox I'm a solution director at tableau I'm based out of the Chicago area so I don't know anybody else here from Chicago area all right all right you guys made it out awesome yeah so if you are on the East Coast and you tried to get here on Monday and your flight was delayed that that's probably on Chicago at this point it's you know the the the only place where I was thinking about could there be a more disappointing season than the 2019 Chicago Cubs season and to which this 2019 Chicago Bears replied hold my beer so but anyway but it's home so believe it or not this is my seventh TC and the first couple T C's I thought were you sad I was at a blow customer and had the opportunity to be exposed to tableau for the first time and really the first tableau conference I went to I was just sort of looking into tableau our organization was trying to decide if that was the right sort of thing for us and it really wasn't sure just so you know it's way more fun to come to tableau conference as a customer than as an employee so that's great good for you guys just a bit about my tableau journey I started out as a customer as I mentioned my background was in sort of data warehousing data Mart's ETL kind of getting all that stuff all the behind the scenes things going and when I first went to tableau conference what I was amazed at was how the possibilities that I never knew are out there in terms of visual analytics the things that you could do when you combine that back-end data stuff with the ability to do some really interesting analytics and really what I got back from that first conference I was hooked I knew that you know tableau was going to be a part of what I wanted to do in my career going forward so I continued to work as a tableau customer for a couple years then actually joined tableau a little over four years ago at tableau I work in our professional services area which means I basically get to work with a lot of customers I get to go out and help them implement everything from sort of technical server and integration issues to user engagement to adoption to desktop training sort of everything in between so I really get to see sort a lot of the different aspects of what it takes to to implement tableau and really that's kind of why blueprint is something that I'm I'm very passionate about I'm very interested in blueprint really is a lot of the things that we do in the field the things that we try to do to make customers successful and when we're talking about what does it take why is little print important that's a big piece of it why is this called the hammer and nails edition because this is not a tableau blueprint overview this is really we're going to talk about some of the things that can happen when you actually take tableau blueprint and sort of get to the jobsite and start applying it in the real world so we're going to talk a little bit some of the tactical stuff that happens when you kind of combine what's in blueprint with what happens it sometimes in your own organization so sometimes it's things you didn't anticipate and we've seen a lot of those and so I'm gonna hopefully give you some examples of some of the things that we've seen as well as how we're gonna look at overcoming those so this is not a blueprint presentation as I mentioned it there's a lot of good resources online about blueprint there's a lot of places you can get more information there's just no way I could do blueprint justice so what I decided to do was take all 195 pages of blueprint and just discern it into a seven minute presentation so you're going to miss a little of the nuance let's just say right you're not going to get much of the detail but hopefully it'll give us all a good level set right we'll all at least have a basic idea of what we're talking about if it's completely new to you I would strongly encourage you to there's all kinds of places around the tablet conference that you can get more information or certainly online as well after the overview I'm going to focus a little bit more on what I would call kind of the tactical considerations one is we're going to talk a little bit about context and the importance of understanding how to apply blueprint into the context into which your situation is we have a lot of customers with a lot of different backgrounds a lot of different information backgrounds IT backgrounds business backgrounds and so the context becomes really important the real world in which you're going to apply it then what I'm going to do is actually take some samples some real-life examples of things that we see pretty consistently out there and as we've tried to implement blueprint and then what are some of the things we have to work around what are some of the the issues that sometimes come up that makes it difficult to implement blueprint and then also talk obviously about some strategies to help help overcome those most of the content of this comes from kind of real-life stuff that we've done and between me and my colleagues that we've seen out in the field experiences that we've had its customer successes that we've been able to achieve I mean what that looks like all right but before we get started I have a little secret about tableau blueprint this is just between me the people in this room everybody watching in the live stream everybody's good everybody's gonna watch this on YouTube later but but the secret about tableau blueprint is that it's not new so we unveiled tableau blueprint @tc europe in this summer I think was in June and and in the sense that it's a new concept a new way to package these things it's true what tableau blueprint did though the information within tableau blueprint has been around for a while it's been floating around in different parts of the tableau organization different things we that we've implemented the the sales organization and the in pre-sales and everybody kind of fun and post sales and everybody implement has has worked on different aspects of that but what we've done now with blueprint is taken all of that information all of that knowledge all of those best practices put them together in one frame work and sort of canonized it and sort of given everyone both internal and external a way that we can kind of talk about these things in a common vocabulary so one of the reasons it's very exciting is because now we we have a common vocabulary that we can talk about when we talk about how do we become successful with implementing tableau blueprint has really given us that but at its core a lot of the content is actually not really new per se those things have been around for a while so I have a tendency to talk fast as you probably already figured out but I'm going to try to resist that temptation and still be able to give you a good overview of blueprint in in seven minutes at its core tableau blueprint is a methodology it's a methodology for building the capabilities you need to create success a successful data-driven organization that's the definition it's sort of the highest level it's it's how we have found people are successful in doing things and then obviously from there there's a lot of elements to it but why do we even care about blueprint why is this a thing why are we talking about blueprint is you know why aren't we just out there kind of working on tableau desktop and server and getting them installed and all that well when we want to think about what we want to do we should always take a step back one of the things we do in tableau all the time is we ask why if somebody says hey we want to create a dashboard that looks like this we might say well why do you want that information well I'm trying to understand the relationship you're doing this okay well how do you use that information we constantly ask why it's no different with blueprints so we say we want to become a data-driven organization that's good I like that that's that sounds pretty good but why do we want to do that well we might say you know what is an organization we want to prioritize fax over intuition that's really where we want to go okay again that sounds really good let's let's take it one step deeper you know we want to find new business opportunities right maybe that's your story so why do we care about blueprint well yeah we want to be a data-driven organization but that has very specific manifestations for every organization that implements it so if you haven't already seen it I'm be surprised but this is the primary image of blueprint this is sort of the what we call the subway stop model that we're gonna look at and this is really where we kind of define what blueprint is and there's detail behind every all eleven sort of subway stops as well as each of the the Trustin and govern areas so I'm gonna give a very brief overview but but just to kind of give you a spirit for what is included in blueprint it starts over there on the left-hand side with analytic strategy so this is really a discovery process this is about understanding what is it we're trying to do with analytics why are we on this journey what are the things that we hope to accomplish what are the business outcomes that we hope to achieve what are the goals is it to get better information out to our partners is it to help enable a better research and development what are the kind of the broad themes of what we're trying to accomplish with analytics starting to think through those from a strategic perspective asking the why questions and how questions and all that at a very basic level of what we're trying to achieve and that will lay the groundwork for all the work that we're going to do after after the fact truth be told most people come into this sort of different they may have implemented tableau and then they had a few tactical questions they needed to answer and then later they would go back and say okay well let's think about this a little more broadly a little more strategically maybe you started out one department at tableau server and then you decided that more people needed this and thinking through what we actually want to do makes a ton of sense we're trying to get this set up the right way right after that we need to look at people we need to understand who's gonna be the executive sponsors behind this how is this going to be important to their job what roles are going to be needed do we have the right people in place do we have the data stewards do we have the different roles that might be necessary to accomplish this who's going to be kind of on the team who's going to lead the team those kinds of questions then are sort of laying the groundwork for each of the steps that we're going to follow after that so so analytic strategy is generally use case driven we generally say these are the kinds of things we want to do so we start writing down use cases and we started thinking through those use cases and then once we have that we can build kind of a personnel plan around that once we've done that we can move into kind of the core of it agility proficient is a community all under a trusted and governed platform so what is agility and again I'm going to summarize it at a really high level it's making sure that we have a platform that is going to be able to support what it is that we're trying to do so it's making sure that we have the IT resources in the right place that we have the servers in the right place that we can grow that we can handle new use cases that we have the ability to be flexible in terms of what we want to accomplish going forward with our analytics strategy that the old way of looking at this was always it's sort of a I get everything installed and then I can kind of go like this right like the software is installed the server is installed call me if you need anything and that really applied into kind of a static world where you know you'd add a couple users and you know maybe add some RAM every once a while we're talking about a very different world where they're constantly have to be monitoring maintaining and monitoring what how my users are continuing to use this so they can be most effective it's not that it requires any more maintenance that we want to be proactive in terms of how we're actually managing this environment so agility is the word we use to describe all of those things it really it generally revolves around tableau server right it generally revolves around all the things that have to be in place to do that in addition we have proficiency which is really how do we actually work with analytics how well-trained are our people do they know to use tableau desktop do they know the visual analytics strategies could they build a good viz which power users are doing things in which you know where do we need to grow in that way ku is education it includes learning paths includes a lot of things associated with becoming more proficient at actually using analytics within our organization and it's this is a good I mean all of this is a good place to be real honest with yourselves organizationally say you know we've got really four people in our company and that's not unusual to say who really know this stuff everybody else is an absolute beginner that's okay right that's part of understanding where you are on the journey and then finally we have community so community is really the area where we I love that where I'm giving this talk at table conference cuz you get to see a great example of community right this is where we can kind of all get together and we're gonna talk about things that are important to our organizations of which tableau is part of it but we're gonna also be able to share stories about what's working what's not working having that external community that you can go to where you can say how did you enable your users how did you be able to you know how did you overcome this problem is is huge having that same sort of community internal to your organization is also important do I have a place where people can go to get additional support do I have a well-thought-out intranet page where they can go and understand what they need to do to get a tableau license for example or where they need to go to get more information do I participate in tableau use of groups outside of my company do I host them there those kinds of things all of those things really make a difference in terms of what our most successful customers do when they're implementing tableau so the community piece of it has an internal component and an external component and both of those are important so you've seen the impact of a strong community because you're here today finally trusted in governs so governance is one of those things that has a probably a stigma attached to it and then the the stigma is this well governance is that thing that locks everybody down and makes it hard to do stuff right and as you know working in tableau tableau is kind of a data to the people sort of company right it's like ya get all the data out there right but obviously and I'm talked about this this morning was the importance of you've got to do that in a way that makes sense you know the codebreakers had very specific buckets in which they could work but within that bucket they were able to freely share data those were there particular governance rules I'm gonna give some particular examples of how this manifests itself but you have to have those rules of the road the example I like to give is if you put all of your data out there and just kind of threw it out into it you know a number of very large data sources with lots of different fields and said okay you know users as business users go at it right with no sort of metadata attached to it and no idea of what was you know have you enabled them well in one sense you have because all the data is out there but in another sense they have absolutely no confidence in anything they're going to be connecting to they don't know that necessarily what it was updated they don't know if it's good data they're not sure what the right data source is to answer a particular business problem so if I do governance in the right way it actually enables more people to be able to use tableau server to get the answers to that question so we're gonna talk about that balance like how do I create the governance that I need without sort of overwhelming people with you know rules of the road and those kinds of things so trusted and govern is a theme that will run throughout the the blueprint and actually is one of the areas where we get a lot of questions and inquiries and how does this fit into my organization so we'll spend a little bit of time talking about that specifically okay did I do it I know seven minutes I'm probably not let's call it it's it was close enough so that was my very quick overview of tableau blueprint again and you really should get more information there's lots of places you can do that so for that what I want to move to now is while that's important we're really going to start looking at why the context is important and we're going to do this via an analogy and the analogy I want to use is primarily around a blueprint you would use for building a house or building a structure the the idea of doing that there's a skill behind doing that how do I you know how do I know how to design that what do architects do what do they what are the skills that they they profess and these are the listed seven here these are principles of design this has nothing to do with tableau these are sort of if you go out and say what are the principles of design whether you're you know building doing landscape architecture or actual buildings I've seen different lists summer six summer ten but these generally seem to be the ones that most people agree are some of the important aspects of design so we've got unity balance and color transition line proportion and repetition so these are great principles and work but just sort of knowing these obviously doesn't make you a designer it's good to know that what really is going to matter is when you know how to apply those in context so let's take our building example balance means that your house doesn't look lopsided right you did you don't want to have necessary a house it's perfectly symmetrical side to side but it should be balanced you should have good proportion to your house it should relate well to the size of perhaps the other houses around it the window size and the door size should be a certain relationship there should be a number of windows spaced appropriately to give your eye a nice balance to it the repetition of things like shapes and colors are important where do I put the where do I put landscaping where do I put trees all of those things go into it if I know the principles that's good what really matters though is I have to know how to apply those principles to the particular situation that I'm working with that's what makes a good architect a good architect knows how to apply the principles of design so knowing the principles is important but knowing how to apply them is really what we want to get at so let's look at that from a blueprint perspective let's say that I had to build a house and my thought was you have a 50 foot wide urban lot to build your house on this might be the right design for that particular context that I was working in right I don't have a lot of room to work with it's going to be a single car garage I want to give it a little bit of you know interest so I'm gonna put a gable on there and and kind of put the door back so this would be the appropriate use of design in terms of balance in terms of all of those things for the context that I have there which is like give a 50 foot wide lot to work with right you just don't have a whole lot of room across law to do what you want to do if I had five acres this might be the appropriate design right this is going to again it uses all the same principles of design in terms of balance and flow and in repetition and color and all those but it's you know very very different context let's say that I have this house but maybe there's an interstate right behind this house right well I have to think about that context too how am I going to adjust my design to account for the particular situation that I'm dealing with so the design is important but understanding the context of where we're trying to apply this makes all the difference so in blueprint these are the six areas that we listed but just sort of knowing that those are the six areas is good information and if I read through the entire 197 pages of tableau blueprint you would know a lot of good information about what some of the best practices are but what's really gonna make you a good architect what's going to make you very successful it's knowing how to apply those into your context your particular situation that you're facing right now do you have a small lot do you have five acres what are the what are the strengths of your organization what are your weaknesses what are the areas where you've struggled understanding all of those things makes a difference in terms of how you're going to implement Bleu prep so let's consider two fictitious companies who might want to be implementing blueprint we'll start with the first one I've nicknamed them mega industries so mega industries has a an executive team that is fully committed to an analytics based strategy that's kind of who they are at them at the at the officer level the line managers are pretty comfortable with analytics they understand its importance its role they're used to working with data the board recently approved a large capital expenditure that focuses on an investment in analytics that's a part of the strategic plan for the next two to five years HR trains people in using data they hire with analytical capabilities in mind and finally the data they've recently completed a major data consolidation project based on a cloud-based data warehouse so almost all the OP major operational systems now have data accessible to them in there and that particular environment so that's mega industries now we're gonna look at many industries many industries is very interested in analytics because they like analytics because it provides some cool new dashboards with pie charts lots of maps and dials and stuff and also lots of color so that's the direction that's been given from the executive suite is that's that's kind of why we're gonna do we're gonna do this tableau thing line managers can mostly spell analytics that's good the board is trying to squeeze the IT budget to increase profitability new hardware requests typically require six to nine months to approve and implement HR is not aware of the importance of data analytics most of the company's key data is in a 30 year old COBOL based system that is supported by the last two remaining members of the project team that implemented the system in 1984 it is available via daily batch updates of requests for pipe delimited text files right love it yes sir you're good that's me yeah you get the idea so let's think about this so the context right is absolutely key both of these organizations can implement blueprint the the principles that are in containing blueprint apply to both of these organizations we don't change anything in blueprint how we're going to do it what are we actually gonna do on the ground it's gonna be very different what things are we gonna emphasize what things are we going to you know to stress where the areas we need to really focus are going to be completely different and that's what I want to want to get us to think about what are the context of our particular organization what are the areas where this is going to be very important for us so I'm gonna look at some specific examples but I want to think always in your hopefully none of you work for many industries but I doubt many of you work for mega industries either right we're all sort of somewhere in between we've got some stuff that we do okay but there's some stuff that could be better so the reality is most of our organizations are somewhere in the middle some of us have really nailed aspects of blueprint I think if you if you were to find out and take an assessment you'd find out you know actually we're pretty good at that right we we've got that pretty well done most of our for example most of our people do know how to use tableau desktop well and how did build Analects now we have no governance but you know we we can do that so you'll find that there's things that you're already pretty good at and things that you struggle with and that's really where an assessment can be useful but the key is to understand our context and our organizational strengths all right so let's build in this what we're going to do is I'm going to continue to use this home building analogy because I think it really works so well organization might be the equivalent of a 50 foot wide lot you might be the equivalent of having five acres back into an interstate you may have all kinds of design restrictions but what we're gonna do is we're gonna take some good look at some real practical examples of where this plays out where I've actually seen this happen and customers who try to implement blueprint and kind of struggle based on their organization so first I'm gonna list what the the blueprint principle is so what I'm gonna it's actually literally pulled it right out of blueprint pasted it right into the slide what does blueprint say about this particular area then we're going to talk about what might be the context like yeah but right the the part where it's like I don't really fit that because here's the problem that I have with my organization and then we're going to talk about some strategies to overcome what you know how do we get around that how do we work through that so a lot of the I didn't pick these at random I picked these kind of based on what we see a lot of right so these are pretty typical things you know a few of you may recognize a few these from your own organization but hopefully they'll give you an idea of again why how we apply things in context so let's dive in first one we're going to talk about is deployment Taplow blueprint says this regardless of where you choose to deploy tableau server properly size hardware's critical your planning should be aligned with evolving business needs by accessing survey by assessing server utilization user engagement more frequently scaling more frequently in changing topologies more frequently than other software applications the whole idea of being able to be agile tableau server tries to make it very easy to do that you can do stuff in the cloud you can do stuff on Prem you can do things between Surrey there's a lot of you know tools you have to do that so but this if this whole idea of agility is really key to deployment yeah but what about you know this situation where there's just no money I haven't no sir there's no I can't be agile when I cannot obtain any more hardware right how do i how do I work through that situation until 2020 there's no additional hardware available for tableau that's my context right that's my that's my world that's where I'm living that's what I have to deal with so maybe this is your situation the blue line is the number of cores you have dedicated to tableau server the orange line is your plan user growth for next year and a half right that's that's kind of what you're facing is a maybe a table administrator or implementer you're looking at that saying yeah that's pretty much what's gonna happen how in the world that I get to do that what am I going to have we're gonna handle that particular situation so by analogy this is like saying to a builder okay I want you to build a house but yeah there's a little bit of a problem with a lot that you might have to you know adjust your standard dimensions and your standard plans a little bit in the middle so that's okay I'm a good architect I can do that yeah well the lot kind of looks like this so and I very much applaud whatever architect figured out how to put a house on a 10 foot wide lot in what looks like a parking lot but they were able to do it and so what does they have to have to get creative right they have to understand this is what I have to work with and so I'm still going to build a house here I'm gonna make some design decisions and some trade-offs that maybe would be not optimal but it's going to allow me to accomplish what I need to accomplish so just like the the Builder in these two examples we're able to kind of get creative and and work with what they had to work with that's what we have to do as to what we're trying to look at implementing tableau in a less than maybe optimal situation the key in a severely restricted infrastructure is ruthless efficiency how to do more with less so here's some examples of how I can do some more with less one you're going to - you may have to do more tuning generally tableau comes in a pretty well tuned environment it works for the vast majority of people and you don't have to touch a lot of the things a lot of the buttons you may find that based on your particular usage profile you're really going to have to ruthlessly tune tableau beyond what you might have to do in a standard environment just to be able to support the additional the workloads that you have that may mean more more frequent changes to your deployment profiles it may mean just constantly monitoring that to make sure that you are handling the load but you have to you may have to spend more time actually working through monitoring your environment and making changes as you need as needed I always tell people consider minimum is kind of a cheat but the the cheapest way to buy more efficiency or to buy more performance and capacity on a tableau server is to buy more memory you get to a point where diminishing returns I get it but generally if you can't buy more servers that's always a trick I try to tell people to think about police your users in content so we're gonna talk more about this later so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it but there's a whole idea of if I have to be ruthlessly efficient there are things that you're just not going to be able to do on the tableau server right that I have to be able to to say look I know you cannot have 40% of the capacity of the box for your background or update I'm sorry that's not gonna work we have to work on something else some of the way to do that or you're gonna have to do it once a week instead of twice a week or you know those kinds of things looking at what the user activity is and then finally as Marie Kondo would say we discard everything that does not spark joy in this case of tableau we offload anything that can be done elsewhere right so we look and we say are there calculations that I'm doing in my my tableau server that I could probably do in the datasource are there things that I could do in tableau desktop which essentially would run on a local machine that I don't have to necessarily do on server how can I maximize the efficiency of my particular machine based on the fact that I'm extremely capacity restrained so these are just examples of some of the ways that we as architects as the as people who are implementing software have to get creative with what we've been handed right hopefully in 2020 the restriction goes away and we're able to implement you know in the way that we'd like again but for now these might be the kind of the rules of the road all right so that's that's our first one is deployment I'm gonna move on to analytics best practices this is what blueprint says about analytics best practices think not just as an analyst but also as a designer and a consumer dashboards should have interactive elements that are discoverable and predictable follow a sensible logical layout have a simplified design that makes complex decisions easier I actually love the sense because it's a really good or a couple sentences because it's a really good way to kind of sum what good design and tableau desktop looks like wow what we're actually trying to get at so this is what blueprint is trying to do and this is really what as we're aspiring to well yeah that's fine but my business analyst said it needs to look like this hey so yeah I know what you said about analytical design visually pleasing interactive all that kind of I know that but this is kind of what they asked for and really this is really what they like right I'm sure nobody's ever faced had an issue before so okay we gotta go okay yeah and we think about okay what could we do right so how can we take the blueprint principles of interactive elements and all these things and visual good visual design and sort of handle the restriction that we've been we've been given all right so the first thing you have to remember and I think we all kind of know this is converting to a visual analysis paradigm is new for a lot of people especially those who have used the existing view that we've used of data for a long time Excel right it the history of that goes back so far and that has been the way that people have consumed data for so long we have to be aware and a little bit sensitive to the fact that that's kind of what people are used to right and we're really this is a pretty big leap this is not a little oh just get over it and start using visual stuff it's a big it's a big deal and I think sometimes you know we come to tableau conference and everybody's all Rara but visually I know it's a design right if we get back and we're like why doesn't everybody feel this way in my organization right it's a little frustrating so but I think a little sensitivity is is is in order here a little bit of like understanding about yeah this is kind of how they've work with data for a long time so here's my bill let's go use a building analogy let's say that you have a your house and your your banister is falling down and so you say well you know what I need to replace my banister the wood banister that I had before is falling down this is the one I saw on the catalog I'm going to get a banister that looks like this because you know what it's kind of like this is kind of like my old one it's just newer and the the spindles aren't rotting right so you might do this you might decide to replace your old old man with the new banister that kind of looks like that one why because that's what you always have but what does a good designer do what does a good interior designer do they go you know there's this thing now called metal and you can get some really cool-looking banisters that use metal spindles and have design and have all that and you go oh I didn't even know that existed right or I didn't even know that was a possibility what a good designer does is opens you up to possibilities that maybe you didn't know about so if your banister is a spreadsheet you know we have a very upgraded version of that but we have to let people know about it and we have to let them know kind of what that looks like and how it works you the other place you might see it is if you go into a car dealership and you say I'm looking at the the RL model well you know the the GT model has everything you want plus you know this and this and this right now that's an upsell I get it but it's also a good person will show that look that's a better fit for what you're trying to accomplish understanding this is what you actually need I'm I can understand your needs this is how I can actually meet that need so that's how it might work in the in the the homebuilding world this is how it might work in tableau so in this case here is my tableau I actually created this in tableau it was painful but I did it this is what the what the person asked for and you'll notice up at the top I have two tabs okay so this this is one of the tabs if I go to the next tab it looks like this same data same information shown visually shown interactively shown in a way that I could actually make some real business decisions that would actually might actually affect my organization so this is a way that we can say your wood banister is really nice but let me show you something else that you might be interested in and here's the other trick I do whenever I have it load I haven't always load on this view first just a little so what you've done is you've given them the security blanket you've given them the safety my state is still there I can still get a spreadsheet thank goodness all I have to do is click on the tab you haven't taken anything away from me right so that's key you haven't taken anything away from them what you've done is you've given them a better way and hopefully over time they're going to spend more time on this and less time on that to the point where it actually gets the point we're like yeah I don't know that I really need that anymore right I'm not sure that I don't really use that view anymore and that's that's actually a really interesting way to kind of analyze the changes in behavior of users over time the the other reason people sometimes you know want the that design is they're like well I'm gonna download it into Excel anyway and it's like well then we got you know then we have to another discussion tell me why you're doing that what are the things that you're trying to get out of that data other ways that we can provide that to you in an individual and interactive dashboard you know I would say there there is the one thing that this is good for is what we call looking up values so if you want to know exactly in 2012 what was our profit ratio for office supplies in February and you want to look up that exact number this is the best way to do it pretty much every other business question you want to ask it's not the best way to do it so we got to get kind of people to that point I understand care what is it you really want to do with the data and making sure that what we're doing will support that all right so again a restriction that we've been given we you know we know what blueprint says but we have a context that makes it difficult so how do we work around that all right now let's look at one that revolves around data so this one says in a self-service environment the role of data governance is to permit access to data to enable users to get the answers they need while ensuring that security is enforced a really good summary of kind of some of the overall data governance piece that we have hammer and nails context there is no data warehouse the data is everywhere and we are not sure what is reliable real world it so this is always funny like this happens sometimes we're go meet with a customer and we'll have a bunch of people in a room we'll be doing kind of higher level strategic talks about what we're gonna do with data like how we're gonna actually use tableau and you know we'll have some good ideas about just general ideas for dashboards and visualizations and and so then like at the end of the meeting then you know kind of like the executives walk out and there's like a couple IT people left the room they're like you know close the door make sure noise listen really our data can't do any of that right our date is terrible I'm like trust ya you're not the only one right so so the bottom line is there are very few organizations that have like you know what mega industries have right where all their data is and one big nice cloud-based data warehouse and you can get to everything most people have some kind of mess in the data world that's just that's that's real world that's that's kind of the way it works so I want to think about our building analogy again and I want to say what if when I went to the building site and I was getting ready to frame the house they go oh where's the wood for framing oh there it is that big pile over there yeah that's the wood that you need to use to frame the house okay well let's get going so what what we're looking it's like okay I can do that but it's going to be much more difficult right so it's just a process I'm gonna work through it one of the first things I might do is I say you know what I'm gonna organize some of that stuff I'm gonna create some stacks I'm gonna put the two by fours over here I'm gonna put these you know these boards over here I'm going to create some samaris again analogous to what we're gonna do with our data it's like okay I know we're starting out with a pile of data we're gonna slowly over time start to organize that right we're gonna kind of get it into the right areas the right stacks so we can start to work with it a little more efficiently and then as that data gets easier and easier to work with it's going to make it much easier for me to do my my framing now it doesn't mean I don't have to go and go through a two-year process to get all my data are nicely stacked everywhere to do that it's just that I want to work through this as part of the process so if your data sources folder looks like this one and if you look at the very bottom of the screen it says there is nothing here yet which is exactly what tableau server tells you if you don't have anything in your data sources folder this is where a lot of people start right this is where a lot of people begin their their journey everything is maybe in a Twp X that's been published by different people in different places and there's no real data sources yet that's okay right that's the beginning of the journey the thing to remember is if you have data everywhere and it's a mess implementing tableau is the start of make things better right it's not a silver bullet it doesn't fix all your data problems but it is they it's the start of the process of making things better of starting to organize your stacks of wood into little into piles and you're gonna start thinking about okay which day to do I have which dashboard is it going to be used and how could I organize that data a little better where could I put it that I could share it how can I create a shared data source instead of having everybody have their own copy of the spreadsheet so this is a time and you're not gonna have it all done before you publish your first dashboard but an implementing tableau is part of part of that journey that's gonna make it better aim to publish new dashboard or new data sources just like you publish new dashboards so you may say okay every two weeks we're gonna have some new dashboards out there every month we're gonna do some new dashboards think about when could I publish how many that data sources a quarter could I publish you know if I really put my mind to it think of that as a metric that you want to track as something you want to keep looking at doesn't have to be perfect has to be published has to be usable obviously but think about that as a way to measure kind of your growth it's I'm creating another stack of wood right this month I'm gonna create this quarter I'm gonna create this stack of wood try to get the fields in schemer right even if the source will change later I always say if you're if you're like hey well this data is in Excel but we're gonna convert it to a data warehouse so I don't really want to do anything with it well you know what I bet you when it's in the warehouse the fields will probably look a lot like the column names are in Excel so see if you can get that right and if it changes later to a database or source data lake or something like that that's okay so think about in terms of fields in schema and if you can get that right it'll make it a little easier as you move on the last two one is to think about appropriate security in tableau server even if the source same thing if the if the source right now is a spreadsheet you still want to publish it into a folder that has the proper security structure that later will maybe turn into again a relational database or something like that so you can start doing all the security and governance stuff now regardless of what your data source actually is the other thing I suggest is does decide how what ok I've got this giant pile of wood what steps do I want to take right where do I start like what are the things I do first chart your data chart your data on a viz and helps you identify data so here's an example what that might look like tableau visualization where on the right access or on the the value of the data is on the x-axis the ease of access how easy it is to get to is on the y-axis and every single one of my data sources has those two things how easy is it to get to how valuable is it to my organization I can essentially plot and create create a scatter plot for that particular for that information put it on this and actually creative is I mean I've done this with customers creating of is that that shows us and I'm gonna start up in that upper right hand corner say look this is the first first couple things I'm going to work out and I'm going to slowly make my way down into the end to the left over time so having a kind of a methodology to it right thinking about what I want to do I think the encouraging thing I tried to tell people's don't worry everybody's data to a certain extent is amass right tableau has pretty good data but it's you know it's got issues right we have things that we have to work through and we're the data company so everybody has data issues and thinking about it sort of systematically and how you're going to get better and better better and then starting to think about things like certifying data like so once I get these things published there's you know there's lots of things you can do in tablet sort of like certify them all the stuff that they talked about this morning with like the data catalog being able to say I know where this data came from I know when it was refreshed I know I mean that makes a huge difference in terms of the usability of your data as you move forward so take the first step don't be afraid don't worry about the fact that you don't have all the answers done on day one alright so we're gonna talk about measurement so measurement is an area so this is what blueprint says about measurement as tableau is deployed broadly across the organization to users of all skill levels administrators need to ensure that the content that is being created and consumed is discoverable fresh and relevant to your audience to accomplish this administrators should measure the user engagement and adoption that is a tableau best practice continue to monitor how people are using the software the things you've put out there the content that you've put out there so the the normal hammer and nails context we see for this is I don't have the ability to measure everything and keep up with it all I have over 2000 users and it's pretty much just me right I mean that's a pretty common refrain like how do I decide what what to measure what I want to actually do so let's go let's go back to our home ability analogy and think about the home inspector so if any of you have ever bought or sold a house you know the e value or the importance of the home inspector the home inspector comes in and spends a few hours going through and if you are selling the house the whole time the home inspector is there you're thinking oh I hope he doesn't find this right right you're like no don't find that don't find that and if the if you're buying the house you want it to be as thorough I mean it's I want to know every little thing that is wrong with this house right what I've always amazed that is you almost never can hide something from a good book it's back here right they find it right and yet they have think about all the different systems they've got to look at you've got water or you've got you know sink and drain it's a lot bass I mean there's just so many areas that they have to look at well how do they do that right how do they know that two years ago I had squirrels living in my attic right I thought I had them on cleanup well yeah they know where the squirrel droppings are right let's face it right they they know how to do that they know the places to look to find those kinds of things and that's what we have to do with measurement we have to decide okay I can't look at everything but I've got to look at the most important things the things that are really going to drive my over my measurement of my adoption so these are some of the ones that I would say are the most common and probably the most useful your mileage may vary a little bit but dicen the ones that we traditionally use date since last log in creating bins for daily weekly monthly use so understanding what percentage of my users log in every day what percentage of them log in every week what percentage of them log in every month which percentage don't log in at all right that's a good sort of histogram to break down both frequently reviewed content and then I also put in there why why is that the most frequently reviewed content is it one person that hits at forty two times a day because it's constantly being updated or is there a whole department that's using it understanding where the engagement is coming from and why it's being done is really really helpful to knowing how you can best serve your users and increase adoption and look at your power users what are they doing what are they doing differently help understand how they're actually creating content or working with tableau server in a way that's that's meaningful and has got them engaged the other thing I tell tableau administrators is don't hog all the data right like you've got all this data about all the things that are going on there's probably people out in the organization who would love to have access to that right there they may be department heads they may be power users in a different department take the the Postgres data for them publish it out to them and say hey look you can now do your own analysis they may do some of the work for you because it's actually if you make it easy for them it's very interesting this is a classic teaching someone how to fish sort of example right you're gonna like I'm gonna give you the Postgres data I'm gonna make it really easy I'm gonna show you how to do it I might even create a visitor to for you and then you can continue to monitor all the people in your department and find out what they're doing and how they're using engagements going and oh by the way we can maybe get together once a month or once a quarter and talk about it so actually you know sharing the load there's there's some information I put a link in there about blueprint specifically about how to do that so you could actually kind of figure out how to build those views and create them and and create an offline repository for that kind of information so share the love tableau administrators you know share the data all right so these are some of the things I used a since last login right with the bins content ownership right crate bins for create the show the user names up top sort it by like own workbooks or own projects certified data sources understand who your power users are understand you know who are the people that are doing most of the work and what are they doing all right let's move on we got two two more two hits I think this this one is on analytic strategy so this is really about executive sponsorship so what do you do when I mean then blueprint it tells you the executive sponsors set the vision for modern analytics they align projects to transfer transformational initiatives nominate staff for project and advocacy roles and ensure accountability they will serve as a governing body for the use of tableau that's really the what we're Blueprint would say that's really what we need to do the context so often is and this is kind of a amalgamated quote from things I've heard from people I've worked with this you know really when it comes down to it they're just the execs are just not that focused on the details of implementing analytics within my organization they want us to be a data-driven organization by next year but there's just not a lot of tactical focus on this and that's that's a pretty common sort of situation where we get into that and what I try to tell people is okay imagine if you met with your builder and there's certain questions that if you are building a new house that you would want the Builder to ask you that would be important for you to give input into right what kind of tile do you want or something those kinds of decisions but we have to be really careful as people who implement tableau to not put a burden on kind of the executives that they really shouldn't need to deal with like more detail than they really need to know so if somebody came to your builder can you say okay I get the caulk guys here today do you want him to caulk the master bath first or the guest bath right you'd be like what I don't care just get it done right so and I think that's what we have to think about when when we'll what is it we need to discuss with our management teams what are the key things you have to understand that you're a culture change agent right that's part of what you're trying to accomplish you're gonna have to do things that maybe fit outside that area of responsibility what are the non-negotiables is it budget is it training is it timeframes do you need to have a you know once a month meeting do you need to make sure that you have resources to do certain things what are the things that you absolutely have to have the management team part of and just focus on those kinds of things communicate more than you need to even if it's a one-way communication even if you're just feeding weekly updates that you're not sure if anybody's reading I encourage people to really do that to keep their executive teams focused on this sometimes it gets it to be a little bit of a lonely feeling like nobody's paying attention and writing when you're trying implement some more times sometimes it's sort of like is anybody focused on this besides me but I think that's part of what that tends to be a kind of a national behavior and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're you're not doing a good job and it also doesn't necessarily mean the organization isn't serious about what's trying to get done it's kind of just the reality of how these projects tend to work all right so we talked about we talked about measurement also from monitoring without monitoring a set it and forget it deployment can be met with inadequate resources that fail to support the workload of highly engaged users so so many things to monitor so little time right what if I'm gonna switch analogies here and talk a little bit more about this is because I think the car analogy works for this and for the discussion on governance what if all those lights went on at once so right every day it's like I feel like I get so many things the to monitor so many things to watch in my tablet you know it's like there's all these kinds of things going on well certain ones of these lights would mean pull over right now and other things is lights like you know no big deal you yeah you can drive with that fit tonight it's not gonna hurt you so we have to understand what are the important things what are the things that require require possibly really we need to monitor stale content does become an issue not it's not an issue the first month you're using tableau server but it becomes an issue pretty quick background or failures background your status these are things we really need to look at because these can be resource drags if we're not very careful about it we need to look at CPU and memory utilization right if we're not if we're not monitoring that and people are starting to have bad experiences because the box is constantly maxed out that's going to be a big problem I like dashboard response time because it's a proxy for a lot of other stuff that's going on we have this strategy we call like create a canary in a coalmine you set up a tableau desktop low workbook and you run it at a certain time every day right and you track how long it take it should be a little bit more complicated one how long does that dashboard come return over time right and you try to run at the same time so you're you take out that variable because sometimes if you run something at 10 a.m. it takes a lot longer than if you do it at 10 p.m. right but so we try to take that out there and you do it with the same dashboard every single day and you track it over time and you start to see okay you know what it appears that yeah certain days it's bad but for the most part my performance hasn't suffered in the last six months so I've added hundreds of users but I'm okay other times you're going to find where I've really seen a serious decline in the performance or an increase in the time it takes to I want to know about that I really want to know and I really want to track that and make sure I stay out in front of it so it's that's why it's you know carrying a coal mine it's warning me before something becomes really bad and then this is another one I was telling ratio if minutes updating the background err to access frequency large is bad so you've got updates that take four hours to update and people look at it twice a month you know and it's updating every day yeah that might be a problem all right last one is governance so governance a central a tableau blueprint because it is governance that makes self-service possible as the anchor point governance will drive all decisions as the project team develops agility proficiency and community across the organization so here's what people are facing when they think about governance there's two kind of extremes that can be a problem one is people love tableau because it's self-service and easy to use if I restrict it nobody's going to use it that's one fear the other fear is if I don't put restrictive governance on tableau it's going to be chaos so those are the kind of the two things I need to worry about so tableau has different governance models right and I won't go into these in detail there's a whole section on this in the blueprint one is centralized one is delegated and one is self governed so this kind of goes from the the highly centralized model to one that it kind of has the the rules defined at a lower level to one that's completely kind of open and self-governing it's really important to know which of these models you want to apply in which particular situation so if we look at our car analogy on a highway like the Autobahn governance is very very strictly defined the lanes are well-defined thank goodness the speed limit even in this case they have speed limits per lane right so there's some very specific governance and rules associated with this particular environment and thank goodness right that is the appropriate governance model for the Autobahn you want to have that well-defined you want to know which lane trucks are gonna be in you want to know what the speed limit is based on the conditions you want to have different lanes potentially with different speeds you want to have very specific Alain lines you don't want people going in between Lane lines all that needs to be done is that in that environment that is an appropriate governance model this is a jeep Road in southwestern Colorado guess what how much governance there is in this particular there is there is no there is no speed limit sign there is no sign at all other than the signs you see right here at the start of the road which probably says engage your four-wheel drive but I would say that this is the appropriate governance model for this road what if I put a lane line down the middle I mean there's not enough room to one car right it what I'm saying what we're saying is when two cars meet you guys work it out right that's right that's what they should do if I you know what if I'm next to a cliff and I'm it's like no you know you work it out what's the speed limit work it out figure it out the governance model for this road is whatever the drivers kind of figure out between themselves and I would say it's the absolute approach prick model hood if you put the autobahns governance model on this it'd be a big problem and if you put the jeep roads governance model on the Autobahn it really would be a problem right so that's what we want to do with tableau server we want to have an Audubon area so we might have let's say our marketing department they've got certified projects this is well defined dashboards that have been vetted that have been reviewed that are updated on a regular basis and we have certified data sources we know exactly what's in that data source we can talk about how often that data gets updated it's used for all kinds of different reporting I know exactly what's in there I know whether it is or that it comes from so I need to have that audubon data source but I also might need to have a jeep Road right I need to have an area where I can I'm not quite sure if this data is right yet I'm still kind of working with it or it's very unstructured or it's just kind of the latest stuff we got we dumped out of Google Analytics and we're kind of playing with it right now I need to be able to explore things and try things and do different things with that data in an environment that doesn't force me into any kind of rigor my security might be different it might just be things that I can look at right I can collaborate differently I can invite somebody to look at it but maybe you know other people can't see it there you know if I want to update it go ahead update it all day right it's it's that those kinds of rules are not in place so what makes good governance in tableau is creating an environment where you understand where your audubon is you understand where your Jeep Road is and you understand how to create a project structure that supports all of your different environment models that where people get hung up is they think the governance is this one size fits all thing that's going to restrict the people to you know that it's that it's just sort of the first thing it's just the Autobahn it's not we want to have appropriate governments this is a model that you know actually it shows the flows it's one of the things that one of our consultants created this actually and and it's actually a really good way to kind of sum up governance it for a particular custom its works for a lot of environments I found this particular model so go ahead and steal that ok so last thing we're talk about how do we get where do we go from here I told blueprints pages I think what we really wanted to focus on though is the importance of applying it in your particular situation there's a lot of things you can do as a next step you can take an assessment out of the blueprint part of the booth you can chat with your results with different experts you can seek out other people who are in your similar context we have almost 80,000 customers or over 80,000 customers I should say there's going to be people who are in a similar situation as you who are facing the same kind of contextual issues that you're facing so understanding and going out and sort of finding you know what is my context understanding what that is and then going out and talk I mean there's obviously you know we do that professional services we have partners that do that many of you have customer success managers that can help with that or Technical Account Managers other people within tableau and also just within this particular community as well there are so many places you can go to kind of get help with with what you're trying to do alright I've hit a lot of analogies and I'm gonna end with a really weird one this is my calculus book from my freshman year of engineering engineering calculus my math 120 or whatever was so why have I had to go find the screenshot of this I think this is pretty much the same edition this is several and several years ago that I was calculus student but I remember this textbook because it was one of the best text books I ever used to like to learn something in it and I remember like it had a lot of examples and all that kind of stuff it was actually very very useful and you know most of the things you could work out through the textbook so it was one of the best text books I ever had but guess what I still went to class most of the time I still met with my professor I still met with my teaching assistant I still got together with study groups and to practice exams I still did a lot of other things besides use the textbook the textbook was great it like I said it was one of the best ones I've ever seen but for me the textbook was necessary but not sufficient I think as you look at a tableau blueprint you're gonna find that it is a great textbook it offers you a lot of information that's really well thought out and that we've put a lot of time in hours into making sure that we've curated it down but I also think for many of you you may find that you'll want to go past that as you start to implement it into your specific situation as a freshman student I knew what my context was I knew I needed more help in certain areas I knew I had to seek out additional things in your particular situation there may be areas where you're like yeah that I understand what blueprint is but I'm not quite sure how to do that in my company in my organization so that's that's the tableau journey that we're all on is understanding our context and understanding how we can get there so what I've tried to do is take 197 pages of blueprint and give you a good idea of how to tackle some of the thorniest issues that we get your context is your context learning how to apply blueprint in context is important I wish you a great week of learning a little bit of fun and all the best is you implement your blueprint thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

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Length: 60min 16sec (3616 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019