Please note that Portals for Tableau are now officially known as Curator by InterWorks. You can learn more at the official Curator website.
Welcome to our latest Solution Stories blog series, where we delve into real-world client stories that offer valuable insights into navigating and solving common business challenges. These stories are often amalgamations of several real clients, merging real-life scenarios with the common, practical solutions.
Cindy is an analytics leader at a large manufacturing company. She runs the center of excellence for the organization and owns the data and content that live on Tableau Server. They have a hybrid self-service model for their analytics with distributed analytic champions across many of the company’s departments.
As you can imagine, the Center of Excellence and the other departments generate a lot of content, and governance is often challenging. The executive team has noticed many different answers to the same questions, and it’s hard to find the right report with verified answers.
Things are more complicated because a small set of departments, including Finance, uses Power BI, a second reporting platform that often looks identical to Tableau for business users. Executives must often keep track of ever-changing bookmarks or remember the location across multiple platforms and several levels of navigation hierarchy (sites/workspaces, projects/folders, etc.). The reports executives seek are often spread far and wide, built and maintained by many departments.
Cindy and her team needed a way to make it easy for people not living in the day-to-day of analytics to find the answers they needed quickly and effectively. The solution they landed on was an Analytics Portal. By leveraging the embedded analytics capabilities of both Tableau and Power BI, Cindy and the team can allow the various departments to organize and maintain their reports as they see fit while delivering a more focused experience for other users. This Analytics Portal serves as the production location for their executives and other non-data analyst users, enabling a single location for reports across departments and platforms:
Two key capabilities made the difference for Cindy and the team. The first was the ability to organize the content into easy-to-use navigation. Organizing things in the Analytics Portal didn’t impact the underlying analytics system while providing an intuitive navigation to their users. This capability allowed them to reduce the noise and made it easier for users to discover the essential reports that were relevant to them.
The second capability was setting a custom homepage depending on the user. A personalized homepage allowed them to put the most critical reports directly in front of their users. For one executive, their KPI dashboard was front-and-center as soon as they loaded the homepage. For another, that meant having their six most used reports with customized thumbnails in a grid on the homepage. Finally, for the broader management audience, it meant a homepage that promoted new or relevant dashboards and a section to communicate to their users any important news about their data or reports.
Cindy and the team considered several options when starting the Analytics Portal initiative. They could, of course, go the do-it-yourself route, but they didn’t have web development skills on the team and no experience maintaining a website long-term. Ultimately, they landed on working with us to build the experience together and leverage Curator to enable easy maintenance long-term.
Cindy’s story shows us one of the ways we can reduce the noise in your analytics space. An analytics portal is an effective way to manage multiple platforms, streamline user experience and make your content more discoverable regardless of your team’s skill set or size. By customizing the navigation and tailoring the homepage experience to your users, you can make sure your analytics content gets the attention it deserves.
Are you looking to reduce the noise in your analytics space? Curator is one solution, but you might also consider evaluating the data governance of your current analytics platform or developing a roadmap for simplifying and consolidating your analytics spend. Whatever the right path for your company, we’re here to help you find it. Reach out; we’d love to chat.
