Tableau will add customers and seats with best practices, new capabilities and utilization of Salesforce’s sales teams

Tableau aims to help enterprises create a data-accepting culture

From the opening keynote to the breakout sessions, Tableau was consistent in its message that many enterprises are falling short of their analytics goals. Part of the reason why these enterprises are falling short of their goals is because of their corporate cultures, in which people do not understand the value of their data and business users are apprehensive about manipulating data. To help chief data officers and data analytics advocates shift company culture, Tableau created the Tableau Blueprint. In the analyst breakout session “Leading to Data Culture,” Tableau VP of Product Marketing Mark Jewett defined a data culture as “the collective behaviors and beliefs of people who value, practice and encourage the use of data to improve decision making.” Tableau Blueprint is a free, 190-plus page document of best practices curated from Tableau customers that have successfully shifted toward a data-accepting culture. Shifting a company’s culture to be accepting of data necessitates an executive team that makes it a strategic priority, as well as implicit changes such as cultural habits and explicit policies and resources. Implicit changes may seem ambiguous, but TBR believes that creating an environment in which employees feel comfortable and encouraged to learn about data analytics will breed a data-literate workforce that can better utilize Tableau’s products, enabling customers to achieve a greater return on their technology investment. Tableau Blueprint incorporates this ethos into each step of the customer’s journey, from bringing Tableau onto their infrastructure to training their employees on Tableau to creating an ecosystem that can answer questions for their Tableau users. While Tableau Blueprint will largely be used by data advocates within an organization, TBR expects that Tableau’s consulting partners will also use the set of best practices when implementing Tableau for their enterprise customers.

To further ensure customers are getting the most out of their Tableau products and realizing their strategic objectives and business goals, Tableau’s customer success teams help customers throughout their journey, from acquiring licenses to post-implementation. This is a strategy that Salesforce, which acquired Tableau, has used since its inception, leveraging its customer success team to help customers — and partners — through customer management, customer support, and advisory and consulting services. Tableau collaborates with partners as well, but TBR expects that Tableau’s customer success group will become more akin to that of Salesforce in offering support to both customers and partners as the two vendors collaborate to help customer and partner ecosystems utilize their Salesforce- and Tableau-integrated systems.

Tableau Conference 2019 (TC19) took place in Las Vegas, where Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky, Chief Product Officer (CPO) Francois Ajenstat, Senior Product Manager Graeme Britz and others presented to 18,000 Tableau customers and partners as well as the analyst community. Some of the keynote topics included new augmented analytics and self-service data management features, as well as changes to the company’s strategy. These topics were complemented by success stories from enterprise customers, such as Nissan, highlighting how Tableau helped transform their organization.