Submitted By

Lisa Damboise, lisa.damboise@cu.edu, Assistant Director of Data and Business Intelligence, University Information Services (UIS)

Project Team

Lisa Damboise, lisa.damboise@cu.edu, Assistant Director of Data and Business Intelligence, University Information Services (UIS)
Arsadur Rahman, arsadur.rahman@cu.edu, Business Intelligence Analyst/Developer, Data & Business Intelligence Team (Information Resource Management), University Information Services
Elizabeth Rose Snow-Trenkle, elizabeth.snow-trenkle@cu.edu, Business Intelligence Analyst/Developer, Data & Business Intelligence Team (Information Resource Management), University Information Services
Viet Phan, viet.phan@cu.edu, Server Administrator, Enterprise Cloud Systems, University Information Services
Lonnie Maynard, lonnie.maynard@cu.edu, Systems Architect, University Information Services
Cindy Kraft, cindy.kraft@cu.edu, Project Manager, University Information Services
Mohammed Faraz Ali, mohammed.faraz.ali@cu.edu, Principal Cloud App Engineer, University Information Services

Project Description

Tableau is a business intelligence tool that helps people see and understand data. With interactive data visualizations that can handle large amounts of data and robust analytics, Tableau helps organizations be more data-driven in their decisions. The new Tableau Enterprise Server project was undertaken with the goals of providing increased processing capabilities across campuses, expanded data collaboration opportunities, decreased contract and licensing costs (almost $1 million over five years), and more centralized support for upgrades and enhancements delivered by the UIS team. Existing servers and their data/users were migrated to the enterprise-wide server. With over 1,757 dashboards and 77,901 users, the extremely smooth migration process was a great accomplishment for UIS and our campus partners.

Project Efficiency 

The negotiated enterprise-level contract will save CU $900,000 over the next 5 years. Originally, two campuses had campus-based licenses, which were only available to their users. Now, with UIS as the Tableau product owner across migrated campuses, ongoing management and regular upgrades will also improve efficiency.
Additional efficiencies and benefits include:
• Increased processing capabilities to serve all campuses
• Removes unnecessary product suites in current contracts
• Reduces CU’s Tableau desktop purchase prices by 10 percent with a 5 year price-lock
• Expanded data collaboration and more centralized support for regular upgrades, maintenance, and centralized support for users.

Project Inspiration 

The inspiration for the project was to save the University costs, remove redundancies, provide increased data collaboration, and improve efficiencies with a centralized support model for upgrades, maintenance and user support.

Future Plans

This project laid the foundation for UIS to propose new solutions that incorporate efficient processes and roles to reduce redundancy, centralize regulations and create an integrated environment for developers to learn from one another and collaborate. The project’s enormity led to increased collaboration and innovations that will be used in future projects, including a new process to enable affiliate populations to log in to a CU-managed system. The team also created new processes to manage users and groups. These new processes can be leveraged to create efficiencies for other systems and projects. The UIS Data & BI Team is also hosting a Tableau User Group (TUG), per Tableau the benefits of this are:

  • Developing Tableau champions within your organization means there is less dependence on one or two experts.
  • Being able to collaborate with other Tableau users can improve communication among teams and bring fresh perspectives.
  • When data-minded people get together, often the realization is that more assistance is needed from IT or your Center of Excellence.

What Makes You Happiest about this Project?

This project will enable greater CU systemwide data and BI collaboration, CU cost savings, a centralized center of excellence, support and maintenance, additional BI training provided for Tableau Desktop and consistent processes across campuses due to increased collaboration and partnerships.

For more details please check out the the project URL - https://www.cu.edu/uis/projects-initiatives/tableau-enterprise-server