Leading Change with Data During This Time of Crisis
Featuring Srinivas Kosaraju, Senior Director of Public Sector at Tableau.
As a user of data, you need to have the tools in your agency that allow people with domain knowledge to self-serve. That was really key during this time, because what we found was, agencies talk a lot about data-driven decision making. And, frankly, when somebody who’s working at an agency for 15 years or 20 years or 25 years hears somebody say, “Hey, we’re going to do data-driven decision making,” their first thought is: Well, what do you think we’ve been doing all these years?
So, what we found during the pandemic is by deploying tools that allowed people grab data from the enterprise, grab what a lot of people call dark data, or data from the desktop or spreadsheets that are being sent around, being able to bring those together, visualize them and then share those visuals, either through the web, through a centralized server or anyway possible: It was that collaboration of information across various agencies and departments that was critical to managing that response.
Any opportunity to give end users analytics requires some degree of governance or management, so we generally recommend to our customers that they take a two-tiered strategy. One, where they’ve got a set of governed data sources, which are the central systems of record or source of truth, whether that comes from a SOAR system or a data warehouse or a cloud data warehouse. A lot of agencies use lots of different architectures.
You have that, coupled with the ability for an end user to add their own data to enrich that with a local view or a time-sensitive view or a micro-geographic view. But it’s that governance and management and cataloging of data that allows people to know that, “Hey, this thing that I’m looking at is trusted and blessed.”