By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx for 5 years. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.
I recently got a question from a student. To paraphrase it read, “I work for a company of 200 people. We recently purchased Tableau and are trying to figure out the best way to deploy it throughout our organization. Does it make more sense to have the Business Intelligence team become the experts (centralized approach) and have the business users route requests to them or should we enable the business users to answer their own questions with data (decentralized approach)?”
The truth is, I’ve seen both approaches be successful and I’ve seen both be unsuccessful. To give a specific recommendation to any company, I would need to spend more time getting to know the employees, roles and expertise. That said, here’s a few quick tips you can use to determine which model might work best for you and your organization:
Centralized Model
A centralized model makes more sense when:
● The Business Intelligence team is well-integrated into their organization. They understand the business processes and work hand-in-hand with the business units already.
● Business users don’t have the time, interest, or expertise to develop the technical skills needed to develop their own dashboards.
● Business users can afford to submit a request and wait to get answers to their questions.
● Data security is a high concern and data distribution to business users is limited.
Decentralized Model
A decentralized model makes more sense when:
● Business users need answers now.
● Business users are quick learners and open to developing new expertise.
● The Business Intelligence team is primarily technical and removed from business functions making shared understanding between the different facets of the organization difficult.
If you have additional questions or want a personalized opinion, we encourage you to reach out directly.