In this series, our team unpacks how to boost user adoption of Tableau Server through strategic planning, enablement and quality control.
Wouldn’t it be nice if having a great product was enough to get everyone to use it? And maybe even good enough to have everyone use it in a cohesive, organised manner? So nice. But, alas … you’re here reading this because you live in the real world and need to figure out how to increase and manage user adoption.
Luckily, we have a raft of experience in doing this, and we’re here to show you one or two things we have learned along the way. This new blog series will provide you with loads of resources to support you in boosting user adoption and buy-in. Browse through the sections below for that which is most relevant to where you are and what you need. Then be on the lookout in the coming weeks for the blogs covering those topics. Let’s dive in.
Getting Started by Increasing Awareness
In this section, we will be discussing some of the various pitfalls of Tableau Server user adoption that stem from a lack of awareness. A lot of organisations that have bought Tableau are filled with people that don’t even know that Tableau Server exists. Seems silly, right? Money is spent, but nobody knows we even did it. This often happens in very tall hierarchy companies where leadership and most workers are quite removed. Decisions and adoptions in this environment can travel slow.
Another place I’ve seen this is in an IT-centric environment where the IT or analytics team makes an adoption of this new software but never had buy-in/involvement from the other teams before and certainly didn’t reach out and make everyone aware after. This isn’t Field of Dreams—it’s not always as simple as “If you build it, they will come.” In this post, we lay out our suggestions for addressing this issue.
Improving Adoption by Increasing Use
So, people are aware that your Tableau Server environment exists, but they don’t know what to do with it. Maybe they’ve heard the word before and know that some people log in. They may even have been given access to log in themselves, and perhaps they even did it once by clicking on a link in an email, but that was it. Something else I hear often is that “There’s too much content. Which content applies to me?”. This type of lack of awareness can be daunting. The server admins, analysts and IT team may be thinking: “We built it, it works, and people know about it. Now why aren’t they using it?”
In this post, we will also examine the complexities of switching tools to Tableau:
- Internal
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- Fears
- Challenges
- Resistance to change
- External
- Lack of training
- Lack of transition considerations
Take a closer look at this blog where we examine the various methods available to help users understand what content is available, what questions can be answered with this content and how to help users understand the data lineage and trust the new tool.
Data Quality and Lack of Content
In this section, we look at the data itself. How do we help ensure the data is correct? And how do we limit the time spent creating data sources ready to analyse? We will then look at how to build out sustainable views to make sure your worksheets and dashboards can be automatically updated without any issue. Finally, we look at some tips on how to build out consistent and well-designed content to keep your users engaged. Visit the blog and get insights to help you transform your users’ experience with data quality and content.
How to Organise Your Tableau Server to Avoid Chaos
Even when users know where to go and what to do, adoption can suffer drastically if the experience feels more like a cowboy shootout than a civilised pathway. We will also take a look at five quick fixes to create a calm, ordered and simply great experience for users:
- Quick Fix 1: Sites and projects
- Quick Fix 2: Version control, favouriting and tagging
- Quick Fix 3: Permissions
- Quick Fix 4: The administrative load
- Quick Fix 5: Display your dashboards outside of Server
Be sure to check back soon for the next post where we’ll tackle the topic of getting started by increasing awareness.
