Push, Pull, or Punish – Getting Adoption with Tableau Server in the Age of Distraction (or how do I stop telling people where the server is)

If you’ve ever spent any time with 5-year-olds, you know they love emergencies. These small beings will go out of their way to create what seems like wide-scale, earth-ending, aliens-taking-over-the-planet panic. When you’re young, it’s fun and breaks the monotony. It creates a story and a full-on play attack. Children absolutely live for this and will do this all day, every day, if allowed. Okay, even when not allowed.

 

Unfortunately, a small share of humans never age out of this stage. In the modern world, we’ve let these people not only into our offices and workspaces, we also allow them to have input in app design. Which means we’ve all embraced a life of greater chaos, not just in work, but absolutely everywhere. We’ve let it in our homes by virtue of social media. These bips and bops and dings and dongs have become the music of our existence. Some of us take great steps to mitigate it, only to have what the kids call FOMO, the fear of missing out. Psychologists are even beginning to recognize FOMO as a legit illness of our age.

The opposite of FOMO is FABAM, fatigue and apathy beyond all measure. There comes a point where apathy takes over and we can happily look at all the cute red badges on our screens with exponentially growing numbers and not even blink. We really don’t care. We leave our phones in chairs outside and find them soaked from the rain and may welcome this quiet reprieve, so much so that we take our time getting it repaired. We leave our computers on with 233 browser tabs open, so that streaming ads cause the CPU to overclock, leverage the hard drive for additional memory, and explode the disk in the process (yes, kids, this can happen). Surprisingly, the incidence of recognized FABAM remains low.

We live in a world that can’t make up it’s mind about how we should get information. Should we send it or should people come to us? If you’re setting up Tableau Server, this is a big, big, big question.

Push

In the world of yore, newspapers were handed out on the street. We broadcasted first by yelling, then by radio, TV, and now RSS, Twitter and 150 other apps. We had stuff and pushed it out to the world, no matter who listened. We did this with our flat file reports too, painstakingly compiling them, printing them, collating them, and dragging off excess copies to meeting. We passed them out like candy and hoped somebody would look beyond the first page of our 43-page collection of efforts.

 

When we got email, we started sending them to people, and even made lists based on roles, to cut down the typing. If we got real fancy, we scripted parts of this process.

Push notifications create a lot of waste. Push marketing is even worse. We don’t like push, because it’s not efficient. Or, at least it wasn’t until it was…

Pull

At some point, someone got the bright idea to create a watering hole for information. Put the posters up by the mailboxes, and everyone will find it. Newspapers went to subscriptions, so they had a known base of users who wanted their information. They still kept some at the Panera, but at least you created less waste by having a smaller set of known buyers.

For me, the pinnacle of this model is Tableau Server. For once in my career, I could make a report, hit publish, and then tell users where it lived. Problem solved, hands clean, I wasn’t tethered to forever sending this report. Bring on the party!

 

Except when people just didn’t go and kept asking where it was. Tableau gave me subscriptions, so I could just sign them up instead sending them the URL myself all the time. Yay, problem #2 solved! Except then they only wanted to know about events. Fine, here’s alerting kids.

The pull model creates an excessive amount of resistance. For each pull, people want equal or greater push to balance it. It’s sort of like that awful resistance band at the gym – pulling is hard, but letting it fall back is easy. And that fall back is push notifications.

Punish

After trying to find the balance between push and pull, we go for gold. We sign up our users for all the notifications in the world. Some of them even sign themselves up! And then, we get to the attrition point where no one looks at anything. The 143 pending notifications become meaningless. We hit the ‘Mark all as read’ button on our email without even checking a single one. Including those Tableau alerts about sales stagnation or service lapses that were so urgent. Then the phone rings and someone gets mad. We know this story.

 

‘But it was in the alerts!’ we say.

‘Don’t care,’ says the boss.

So, then we sign ourselves up for notifications that others care about and go back to 1989 where we knocked on doors. It’s not easy being an analyst.

So what do we do?

We live in times of excessive notifications and information overload. While we know this logically, we believe in our own superhuman strength to power through it. C’mon, you know you got that costume hidden under your business suit.

 

So what do we do if it seems we’re destined to fail?

1. Use those reports! With server, we have these reports that tell you everything from load times to who performed what query. How often are people really checking that dashboard? You can also steal Mark Jackson’s work as well.
2. Make custom dashboards! What’s better than out-of-the-box reports? Why, the dashboards YOU make! We also have access to Tableau Server’s PostGRES, which does not get anywhere close to the love it should. You could do your own analysis on click through rates for subscriptions and alerts, as well as seeing if ‘true emergencies’ were caught.
3. Make your own portal! You have access to the data, give the users an experience they love. Then, they will come to the watering hole. Really feeling bold? Include some personal stats on a users homepage with links to help access key dashboards. Or, if you already have a portal, start embedding Tableau there. The more places people have to go for information, the more likely they are to stay at home and order in. Work to consolidate this and you’ll likely find a lot better success.
4. Share the love! All to often, when we get access to powerful things like user level reports and server related data, we want to lock it all up and go ‘mine, mine, mine!’ We can certainly do that and often do, but aside from making us feel powerful, it ends up giving us more (non-helpful) work and making it harder for others. Give your analysts access to the server reports and PostGRES and let some other people see what THEY can be doing better.
5. Play games! Reward people at meetings for going to server. Make intermittent challenges to see who can solve a puzzle of getting certain information (this works exceptionally well with sales people).
6. Create superusers! Find non-analyst people to champion your dashboard. These are, coincidentally enough, the people who will also give you the best feedback. Let them remind people where things are and educate on why that dashboard exists in the first place. They also make excellent trainers on how to use the dashboard because they’re a user, not a designer.
7. Put in guardrails! This may be limited the alerting that can be applied to dashboards, or doing the old-fashioned thing and checking in (face to face, on the phone) with people who have a lot of subscriptions and a low access rate. See if certain items need consolidated into their own dashboard versus being covered by 2 or 3 (or more) reports. Or, gasp, help them unsubscribe to non-essential bits.
8. Get rid of low value dashboards or merge them! We often keep things that never get used, users get overwhelmed by all the junk, and just avoid the whole area. Ever try to clean a child’s play area? You know it’s a wreck, especially when you’ve not culled toys in awhile. Take 2 trash bags while you’re at it.
9. Understand how your work fits into the puzzle! Businesses are often large mammoths with so many pieces, it’s easy for things to get lost. The bigger the puzzle, the smaller your piece usually is, so keep in mind, you may be limited in what change you can make alone. Create a team and leverage those superusers.