Tableau Draws from Customers' Successes in a New Deployment Methodology

-- Best practices for enterprise adoption include a new understanding of the roles of IT and Business

SEATTLE, Oct. 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA) today announced Tableau Drive, a new methodology to support broader adoption of self-service and collaborative analytics. Drive was developed by drawing on best practices of organizations that have seen high rates of self-service analytics adoption.

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Drive smooths the transition to self-service analytics through a series of programmatic and operational initiatives orchestrated for IT and business in partnership. IT teams focus on foundational enablement including security, data governance and provisioning. Business champions support product training, helpdesk, enrichment, collaboration and a variety of culture-change activities. In such environments, end-users have the tools, training, context, support and confidence they need to create analytics – independently or in small teams.

VMWare's successful deployment was one of the many that informed the development of Drive.

"We wanted to create an environment at VMWare for people to explore and innovate with their data in Tableau," said Ginger Victor, Manager, Business Intelligence Competency Community at VMWare. "This has been made possible through a close partnership between IT and business teams, letting us give our business users the infrastructure, tools and support they need. This more agile approach to BI has been a tremendous benefit for us, and we've seen people coming out of the woodwork using our enterprise reporting tools. With this process, we've been able to consolidate hundreds of spreadsheets into three main dashboards for our executives to review."

Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group has been implementing Drive based on an early version of the methodology.

"The Tableau Drive manual is our project plan for our enterprise-wide deployment," said Mat Hughes, Revenue Optimization Global Analytics Manager, Americas at Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group – better known to travelers by its brands: Quorvus Collection, Radisson Blu^®, Radisson^®, Radisson Red, Park Plaza^®, Park Inn^® by Radisson and Country Inns & Suites By Carlson^SM. "We started with one Tableau Desktop license in 2012, we are moving to 500 users this year and plan to have 1,500 in 2015. This methodology guided us through our expansion from a department-based approach to a true enterprise deployment. Drive helped us build the framework needed to support a self-service, agile culture supported by a Business/IT Center of Excellence. We now have employees who are identifying problems and fixing them for themselves in hours instead of days and building reports in weeks instead of months.

Organizations can implement Drive on their own or with support from Tableau's Professional Services or one of Tableau's partners. Tableau is releasing a "How to Drive" manual and quick start intranet to serve as a blueprint.

According to the recent Forrester report authored by Vice President and Principal Analyst Boris Evelson, "It's Time For a User-Driven Enterprise BI Strategy,"* "In order to succeed quickly, Forrester recommends first learning how to fail quickly. Rapid prototypes achieve just that purpose — they allow one to fail quickly, learn from the mistakes (before they get noticed or too many resources get wasted), get progressively closer to the ultimate objective, and then demonstrate value with a stable POC which indeed delivers on the original promise."

The announcement of Tableau Drive comes on the heels of Tableau hiring a new Vice President of Global Services, David Canelis. Canelis has spent his career working to create and deliver service offerings that accelerate adoption and increase a product's value. He previously worked at ServiceSource, WebTrends, Serena Software and Oracle, and has served as a Board Member for the Technology Association of Oregon.

"Enabling people to analyze their own data is the new normal," said Canelis. "Most IT departments agree that self-service is a superior approach to analytics but they want to stay in control of critical aspects such as scalability, security and governance. The Drive methodology puts a structure around agile enterprise deployments that includes clear roles for business and IT."

More information can be found at http://www.tableausoftware.com/drive.

*Forrester Research, Inc., August 2014 "It's Time For a User-Driven Enterprise BI Strategy" by Boris Evelson with Holger Kisker Ph.D., Martha Bennett, and Nasry Angel.

About Tableau

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