Tableau Enterprise

Governed Self-Service Analytics: Roles & Responsibilities (3/10)

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When business super users are empowered to create discovery, data exploration, analysis, dashboard building and sharing dashboards to business teams for feedback, business is taking a lot of more responsibilities than what they used to do in traditional BI & analytics environment. One of the critical self-service analytics governance components is to create a clear roles and responsibilities framework between business and IT. This is one reason why the governing body must have stakeholders from both business and IT departments. The governing body should think holistically about analytics capabilities throughout their organization. For example they could use business analysts to explore the value and quality of a new data source and define data transformations before establishing broader governance rules.

A practical framework for the roles and responsibilities of self-server analytics is in following picture.screenshot_18

Business owns

  • Departmental data sources and any new data sources which are not available in IT managed enterprise data warehouse
  • Simple data preparation: Data joining, data blending, simple data transformation without heavy lifting ETL, data cleansing, etc.
  • Content building: exploration, analysis, report and dashboard building by using departmental data or blending multiple data sources together
  • Release or publishing: sharing the analysis, report or dashboard to information end consumers for feedback, business review, metrics, etc.
  • User training and business process changes associated with the new reports & dashboard releases.

IT owns

  • Server and platform management, licensing, vendor management, etc
  • Enterprise data management and deliver certified, trustworthy data to business, build and manage data warehouse, etc
  • Create and maintain data dictionary that will help business super users to navigate the data warehouse.
  • Support business unit report developers by collaborating to build robust departmental dashboards and scorecards, converting ad hoc reports into production reports if necessary.
  • Training business to user self-service analytics tools

It is a power shift from IT to business. Both IT and business leaders have to recognize this shift and be ready to support the new roles and responsibilities. What are the leader’s roles to support this shift?

  • Create BI/Analytics Center of Excellence: Identify the players, create shared vision, facilitate hand-offs between IT and business
  • Evangelize the value of self-service analytics: create a branding of self-service analytics and market it to drive the culture of analytics and data-driven decision-making culture; run internal data/analytics summit or conference to promote analytics
  • Create a federated BI organization: manage steering committee or BI council, leverage BI& Data gurus in each organization, and encourage IT people to go from order takers to consultants.

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