Supernova Award Category
Tech Optimization and Modernization
The Problem
In late 2015 leadership at Honeywell identified a gap between the company’s traditional reporting and its advanced analytics. While both traditional reporting and advanced analytics were supported by IT, there wasn’t a scalable and secure platform by which business users could access analytics relevant to their workflows. The Honeywell CIO and CFO identified the need for self-service reports and analytics that enabled data integration, and larger data sets, allowed for a visual and interactive user experience, and supported fast prototyping and ongoing iterations.
The Solution
The CIO’s vision was a tool that enabled informed decisions and allowed them to happen quickly. Other crucial considerations included a reduction in cycle times, enabling end user innovation without bogging down IT resources, improved efficiencies and reduced costs to serve the business.
A v-team came together to align the IT and Finance business intelligence objectives. The team defined vision and roles and decided to use Tableau to meet this vision. On the business side they formulated basic training and formed a community of practice. On the IT side, they started a system strategy to ensure that business users could onboard and ramp up seamlessly. Eventually, training materials became more specialized (data visualization best practices, performance optimization) as did system monitoring (governed data sets, system connectivity strategy).
The results
Within one year of introducing Tableau to the Finance organization within Honeywell, the number of users grew from an initial pilot of 300 people to over 9,000. Furthermore, the gap that leadership had identified between traditional reporting and advanced analytics was continuing to spread like wildfire.
The v-team managing the roll-out decided to focus on a few key challenges and tackle those while enabling users to access to test out the tool – even if data sets and training weren’t completely perfect yet. They chose to empower their people with data, and allow them to work with agility. By remaining open and flexible, interested users were able to get Tableau licenses quickly. They also got information on where and how to get training materials so that they could continue to self-educate, as their data discovery needs grew. This is a great example of how to deploy true self-service analytics at scale.
A robust community of practice grew out of this structured-but-open roll-out strategy. The team quickly identified the need for a few passionate and inspired champions from across multiple functional groups. They came to appreciate the power of pilots to identify real business needs that allowed for real-world exploration and live, hands-on training opportunities. They also got involvement from leadership, forums for people to show off their work, and a sense of urgency and momentum to encourage business users to seek out the tool.
Metrics
Within one year, the Tableau deployment at Honeywell grew from 300 pilot users to over 9,000 people globally. Communities of practice sprang up in APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and throughout the USCA region. Support infrastructure is in place to maximize part-time resources, formalize administrative processes, and promote self-service training. Each of these areas of activity directly correlates to the early, high-level objectives both the CIO and CFO outlined as being crucial the long-term success of any self-service analytics platform.
The Technology
Honeywell chose Tableau as it enables true self-service analytics at scale. It’s the only software analytics tool that is built for ease of use for the end user, with the security, scalability and flexibility that IT needs.
Disruptive Factor
The lessons learned after a year-long iterative process were not particularly shocking, in and of themselves, however, when implemented across a global enterprise, they represent a significant sea-change in the way Honeywell managed business analytics.
Within the framework of the business (Finance) and IT working together, the v-team first identified and then broke apart user roles, so that ultimately, role clarity and onboarding paths are clear and supported. The model began by breaking roles into consumers (end users who discover and analyze data), data artisans (data-literate creators who work with the business) and enablers (IT folks who provide and publish data, manage site administration, and promote best practices). After onboarding users throughout the organization and understanding their analytics, process, and educational needs, the team was willing to revisit these roles. The new roles crystalized around artisans (users who publish and certify dashboards, promote use and support consumers), project leaders (project managers who create and manage folders and assign permissions) and admins (who provide artisans access to content, create and maintain Server standards, and publish certified content to maintain analytics best practices).
The combination of framework with openness – and by keeping people at the heart of the deployment – Honeywell was able to see transformational Tableau adoption.
Shining Moment
As a result of success of this initial Tableau roll-out, Sherri and her team were invited to speak at the Tableau Conference in 2016. They were one of a select group of applicants selected to present to Tableau’s global community as thought-leaders in enabling self-service analytics at scale.