The
Data Culture
Playbook Put data at the center
of every decision.
The Data Culture Playbook
Introduction
Transform your business by fostering a data culture
3
How to use this playbook
5
Chapter 1
Define and align key data metrics across your company
6
Chapter 2
Enable real-time decision making with a unified source of truth
8
Chapter 3
Build trust through effective governance
10
Chapter 4
Empower leaders to make faster data-driven decisions
12
Chapter 5
Provide data for every team member in the flow of work
14
Conclusion Future proof your company with data skills and community 16
2
The Data Culture Playbook
With the emergence of AI, excitement around data has never been higher. But
how can your company leverage data to generate insights and make fast business
decisions? It starts by building a strong data culture.
Transform your
If you want to drive business growth with data, this playbook will help you unify
your data sources and embed data analytics into every aspect of company
culture, empowering every member of your team to overcome the most complex
business challenges.
business by
Data has the potential to transform your business. When you promote data-
driven decision making at every level, you can anticipate business trends, deploy
resources efficiently, and maximize revenues by equipping your teams with the
fostering a
insights they need to make better and faster decisions. And it all starts with
connecting people with unified data.
74% of business leaders believe data
Data Culture.
reduces uncertainty.
60% of businesses reported that employee training
would support their data-driven goals.
36% said they use enterprise-wide training on data
literacy and data-driven decision making.
75% agreed that if more organizations consistently
leveraged analytics to make data-driven
decisions, they would achieve significant
revenue gains.
April 2023, Forbes Insights Data to Decision Making Survey, in
partnership with Tableau and Deloitte Digital
3
The Data Culture Playbook
The rise of AI has brought new attention to the value of data and reminds us that businesses need to cultivate a mindset that supports data culture—a shared mission to put data at the
heart of every decision. Companies now feel the importance of analytics, and urgently want to unlock insights and become data-driven. Of course, the importance of data is not new—
data-driven businesses have always been top performers, but with the widespread adoption of AI, businesses that adopt a data culture will be able to generate insights quickly, innovate
faster, and drive unprecedented growth.
Executives, who use and understand the power of data, share the same behaviors and mindset:
83%
87%
74%
83% of CEOs want a data-driven organization
87% of CXOs prioritize becoming an intelligent enterprise.
74% of leaders require data in decision making.
of CEOs want
of CXOs prioritize
of leaders
a data-driven
becoming an
require data in
organization intelligent enterprise decision making
IDC Whitepaper, Sponsored by Tableau, How Data Culture Fuels Business Value in Data-Driven Organizations, May 2021
Creating a data culture may seem daunting, even in the best of times. It takes a commitment from every level of the organization to influence how people think about and act on data
insights. But the good news is, you can take incremental steps to build these capabilities now, knowing that the action you take has a monumental impact: You’ll be able to execute and
scale analytics and business strategies, unlocking your data’s value in the near and long term.
A
re you leading with data?
Find out by asking team members these questions
Do people know how to interpret data
Can people get help from colleagues with analytics or data-related questions
Do we give people access to the data they need
Are people accountable for the data they access and create
Do we require data to support decisions?
4
Want to take the first steps towards building a data culture? Start with data literacy.
The Data Culture Playbook
This playbook lays out a simple, but effective
How to
roadmap for building a data culture. It contains
five chapters, each with a specific focus area.
use this
For each area, we outline how to make it happen—
recommendations on how to build, run, and when
you’re ready, expand and mature these capabilities.
Powerful, branded image.
playbook.
Keep in mind that a data culture isn’t linear—it’s a way
of leading and working that continuously evolves.
We urge you to take a phased approach that makes
sense for your business’s goals and needs. The steps
in this playbook can be executed and repeated, as a
data culture comes to life and after it is thriving.
XX
5
The Data Culture Playbook
Chapter 1
Goal
Define and Appoint leaders from various teams and functions who determine where to focus data
align key
resources. They align on business goals and strategic objectives for the organization.
data metrics What it looks like
across your Assign data resources to areas with the biggest impact. Assess and re-evaluate key priorities
as conditions shift, keeping long-term goals in sight. Start with an audit of organization-wide
company.
data use, reviewing the current state against strategic initiatives, desired outcomes, and
priorities. To understand how your business is performing against priorities, create a key set
of metrics and work with an analyst team to locate, create, and align data sources to support
these metrics. These sources are updated on a regular basis so your leaders can define
expectations on how a metric should perform.
6
The Data Culture Playbook
Build
Run
Expand
Create a data leadership community. Support business leaders with guiding Identify urgent and high-potential
Assemble a team of stakeholders across metrics. Foster a shared single source of projects. Decide when to deploy
your business and analytics functions to truth with visualizations and high-level data resources towards promising projects,
execute strategy and drive growth with data.
sources to support fast internal and when to withhold resources from
communication and swift decision making efforts that are no longer serving your
Prioritize higher value business issues. across your company.
company’s needs.
Making it
Deploy analytics to target areas where data-
driven transformation will create the most Empower business leaders to monitor Assign business leaders to monitor
profound impact.
performance. Compare forecasts against metrics. Make sure leadership has the
happen. historical performance to drive business right data to identify early signs of
Identify key guiding metrics to monitor the growth.
success or failure, and refine best
health of the business. To make the process business practices.
more manageable, limit the number of Track metrics to identify and resolve
guiding metrics to ten or less. business challenges. Offer constant Embed data in company wide
visibility of data metrics to help your communications. Accompany all
business leaders and teams work together communications with data to
to identify trends and resolve issues quickly. encourage leadership to participate in
data-driven decision making across
your company.
Connect with like-minded leaders to learn and help one another bring data
to all types of decision making at the Data Leadership Collaborative.
7
The Data Culture Playbook
Chapter 2
Goal
Enable real- You use business metrics to guide prioritization of data efforts. Your teams build data
sources to address the most critical business questions.
time decision
making with a What it looks like
unified source Data owners and business owners form a cross-functional team to identify or create key data
sources. Ensure that your data sources align to one or multiple parts of a business process.
of truth.
Use a data lake to centralize, secure, process, and organize large amounts of data so that
teams across your entire company can access the unified data they need from a single
location.
Next, identify critical decision points. Use your data sources to inform these points, explore
and model potential outcomes, and measure the impact.
8
The Data Culture Playbook
Build
Run
Expand
Generate insights on crucial business Build data sources to support key decision Track ROI following business
processes. Aggregate data from business points. Support key decision points with improvements. Analyze business
processes most impacted by key data analytics and unified data.
impact with key performance metrics.
performance metrics.
Run experiments with unified data. Offer your teams a single view of the
Making it
Unify your leadership team with data. Achieve incremental improvements by data. Support performance reviews
Structure a workflow where each data adjusting different factors in multiple with data visualization to ensure that
owner, business stakeholder, and process experimental trials.
your team members’ accomplishments
happen. expert all have a single view of the data
and are assigned to oversee a different,
crucial business process.
Identify new drivers of improved
performance. Monitor changes and
are acknowledged and rewarded.
Collect data from process changes.
measure the impact on business success. Document all stages of business
Audit your data use. Work with transformation, and make data
leadership teams to identify relevance of associated with process changes
existing data sources, and resolve gaps in available to teams across your company
knowledge to create a complete and to guide their decisions.
unified view of the data.
Learn how Salesforce can help you create a single source of truth.
9
The Data Culture Playbook
Goal
Chapter 3
Grant your teams access to data to help them take initiative and make decisions. Declutter
Build trust your business' data by personalizing team members’ access and ensuring they find the
relevant data they need.
through What it looks like
effective
governance.
Implement role-based licensing with governance built-in, so you can deploy data broadly
across your organization while ensuring each user has the capabilities they need to make
decisions based on data. Define who gets access to produced content for consumption and
who gets access to processed data for analysis. For some team members it may be helpful to
grant them access to download data sources locally and modify produced content.
Once access is defined, deploy automations to update access quickly when changes are
made to workflows or personnel.
10
The Data Culture Playbook
Build
Run
Expand
Establish clear roles and responsibilities Set guidelines for how dashboards move Establish SLAs around quality, refresh,
around governance decisions. Identify into production. Make sure new data and uptime. For instance, a pipeline to a
stakeholders across the business to manage sources are in line with leadership-defined sales dashboard might be updated hourly
accessibility to facilitate cross-functional strategies.
but at the end of the quarter it may be
collaboration.
updated by the minute. As the business
Making it
Define how your business certifies data grows, SLAs become crucial to manage
Establish strong exterior security around sources. Document and share your data pipelines.
where your data is stored. Deploy guidelines to help you and other
happen. automation to ensure that the right team
members are granted access.
administrators or project leaders to be
consistent with your certification choices.
Provide a catalog to define dimensions
and provide context for your team
members so you can feel confident your
Align data access with project workflows Manage tokens, passwords, and keys. Set business is always using the right data.
to increase organizational agility and one password for each data source.
ensure team members can take initiative Employ row level security. Streamline
with relevant data sources.
workflows and improve security by making
sure that team members only see the data
sources that are relevant to their roles.
11
The Data Culture Playbook
Chapter 4
Goal
Empower Create immediate value and engagement by sharing key data insights through dashboards
leaders to
and data visualizations.
make faster What it looks like
data-driven Create use cases in the form of visualizations, reports, dashboards, and/or workbooks that
are useful, engaging, and offer insights to help solve immediate business needs. Use
decisions.
generative AI to share these data assets across your business so team leaders can receive
text notifications with the exact data asset they need at crucial decision points—sometimes
before they even know they need it.
Teams across the organization can then evolve these assets to suit their own needs and
identify new areas that could benefit from additional data assets. As these assets evolve,
ensure that teams refer back to the definitions outlined in leadership metrics, so everyone is
speaking the same language. Share victories and patterns of success to help create a
virtuous cycle that expands and deepens engagement across the organization.
12
The Data Culture Playbook
Build
Run
Expand
Identify subject matter experts in each Create purpose-built data assets like Incorporate data assets into employees’
department that can provide quick interactive visualizations, addressing key existing workflows by using APIs to set
feedback and ensure that data and business processes and decision points. up embedded analytics in any workflow
analytics teams have the business context Tailoring assets to specific audiences. application.
they need to develop data assets.
Increase approachability by turning
Making it
analytics experiences into conversational Search for and incorporate new data
Identify use cases where teams could interfaces that feel more like Q&As rather into data sources and dashboards that
benefit from access to key data sources than traditional data reports.
support predictive and prescriptive
happen. and engage the tiger team to address
specific needs.
Bring data assets into important meetings
with stakeholders, executives, and board
analytics for more advanced use cases.
Support development of data
Outline requirements for data assets to members to encourage data-based knowledge by adding definitions,
determine if you need supplemental data approaches to prevailing views and to explanations, notes, and metadata to data
to make them relevant to other showcase executive sponsorship.
assets, gathering feedback from users
audiences. Ensure customized metrics along the way.
and dimensions can be mapped back to a Launch programmatic efforts and assign
standardized definition. champions to offer support and coaching
through formal meetings or informal
communications like chat groups or
company portals.
13
The Data Culture Playbook
Goal
Chapter 5
Empower people at every level to have the confidence to follow the data discovery cycle
Provide data with minimal guidance. Create immediate value and engagement by sharing key data
insights right in the flow of work.
for every team
member in the What it looks like
flow of work.
Once people are confident with data, they will want to ask richer questions and create new
data assets for themselves. This means data must be well-described, well-governed, and
accessible. It also requires widespread data literacy—the ability to explore, understand, and
communicate with data. At this stage, organizations benefit from data literacy training
programs to teach fundamental data skills. Fostering community programs gives people a
dedicated space to ask questions, share best practices, and encourage engagement. As
engagement grows, formalize efforts with dedicated owners, leaders, and processes.
14
The Data Culture Playbook
Build
Run
Expand
Prioritize collaboration in department- Focus on enabling rather than creating Formulate a method and a repository
level goals and initiatives, empowering content by expanding training initiatives. to capture learnings, such as an internal
individuals at every level of the organization Open opportunities for all skill levels to portal or Wiki, and allocate employee
to own decisions in their purview and take build confidence and data literacy. Provide time to this function.
action based on data.
relevant examples so people can get up to
Making it
speed quickly.
Document leading practices for data
Expand data exploration by using API discovery to capture successful methods
technology to embed data assets into Institute community-building programs and to provide inspiration to others.
happen. workflow applications, creating a seamless
analytics experience. Enable ad-hoc analysis
through access to natural language
like lunch-and-learns, user groups, or
competitions that set the stage for larger
programs. People can ask questions, get
Actively maintain these practices and
refine as your data culture develops.
platforms powered by generative AI and help, and increase their data skills.
Publicly identify and celebrate data
visual analytics tools.
champions and reward them through
Invest in robust data lineage, the key to promotion cycles, career growth, and
Start innovation and problem-solving sharing data and building trust—make sure leadership opportunities. As data culture
initiatives like data competitions to propose it's easy for your team to track how each develops, consider formal data
new hypotheses that challenge established data asset originated and how it has leadership roles.
notions about how the business works. changed over time. Use your BI platform to
identify and address data quality issues in
sources with the highest usage.
Sharpen your data skills on Trailhead.
15
The Data Culture Playbook
Future proof
The widespread adoption of AI is increasing the gap between the leaders and the
laggards: those who are actively embedding data and analytics into the fabric of their
company culture and those who are hesitant to invest in the programs and the
technology that help them get there. Data-leading organizations pivot when
your company
necessary, innovate constantly, and refine consistently, giving them a distinct
advantage in times of change.
Creating a data culture isn’t a matter of flipping on a light switch. Now is the time to
with AI.
make incremental changes, starting with your workforce. Build out focus areas that
lay the foundation for individuals and teams to expand their use of data. Taking
these steps will help you move in the right direction, future-proofing your data
culture for whatever lies ahead.
16
The Data Culture Playbook
Connect
Tableau with Tableau offers visual analytics with powerful AI, data management, and
collaboration. From individuals to organizations of all sizes, customers around the
Customer 36O
world love using Tableau’s advanced analytics to fuel impactful, data-driven
decisions. Tableau also integrates with Salesforce Customer 360—a customer
relationship management (CRM) platform that connects the business with a shared
view of customer data—giving every department access to the most powerful,
and grow
comprehensive, and intuitive analytics features embedded directly into workflows.
By bringing your customer data to the center of your work, you can grow your
relationships with your customers and employees.
customer
Learn more about the Tableau products.
relationships.
17
