Organizations committed to improve data-driven decision-making processes are increasingly formulating an enterprise analytics strategy to guide the efforts in finding new patterns and relationships in data, understanding why certain results occurred, and forecasting future results. Self-service analytics has become the new norm due to availability and simplicity of newer data visualization tool (like Tableau) and data preparation technologies (like Alteryx)

However many organizations struggle to scale self-service analytics into enterprise level or even business unit level beyond the proof of concept. Then they blame tools and start to try different tools or technologies. It is nothing wrong to try something else, however what many analytics practitioners did not realize that technologies along were never enough to improve data-driven decision-making processes. Self-service tools alone do not resolve organizational challenges, data governance issues, and process inefficiencies. Organizations that are most successful with self-service analytics deployment tend to have a strong business and IT partnership around self-service; a strategy around data governance; and defined self-service processes and best practices. The business understands its current and future analytics needs, as well as the pain points around existing processes. And IT knows how to support an organization’s technology needs and plays a critical role in how data is made available to the enterprise. Formalizing this partnership between business and IT in the form of a Center of Excellence (COE) is one of the best ways to maximize the value of a self-service analytics investment.

What are the key questions that Center of Excellence will answer?

1. Who is your governing body?
2. How to draw a line between business and IT?
3. What are the checks and balances for self-service releases?
4. How to manage server performance?
5. How to avoid multiple versions of KPIs?
6. How to handle data security?
7. How to provide trustworthy data & contents to end consumers?

The ultimate goal of the center of excellence is to have governed self-service in enterprise. The governance can be classified as six areas with total 30 processes:

Governing body

• Governing structure
• Multi tenant strategy
• Roles & responsibilities
• Direction alignment
• Vendor management

Community

• Intranet Space
• Training strategy
• Tableau User CoE meeting
• Tableau licensing model
• Support process

Publishing

• Engagement process
• Publishing permissions
• Publishing process
• Dashboard permission

Performance

• Workbook management
• Data extracts
• Performance alerts
• Server checkups for tuning & performance

Data Governance

• Data protection
• Data privacy
• Data access consistence
• Role level security
• Data sources and structure

Content Certificatio

• Content governance cycle
• Report catalog
• Report category
• Data certification
• Report certification

Please read my next blogs for each of those areas..