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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONSBe Excellent to Each Other (A Center of Excellence Adventure)
Overview of Use Case:
KPMG Lighthouse is the Global Center of Excellence for data, analytics, artificial intelligence and intelligent automation, across tax, audit and advisory. KPMG Lighthouse has a network of over 12,500 experts – including data scientists and engineers who leverage data, analytics, intelligent automation and artificial intelligence technologies to build and deliver solutions that transform the business of our clients. KPMG shows how different departments came together to implement a cultural shift within analytics and enabled Alteryx at an enterprise level. In this use case, they explain how to build a community of affluent users, develop controls around governance and how to effectively stand up a Center of Excellence for their users.
Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve
One of the biggest problem’s we’ve noticed with not only our company, but our clients is sparking Alteryx user adoption and developing best practices at an enterprise level. Changing the way people do business and getting them to use this new tool that we have access to; it’s our biggest challenge, and that's really what our Center of Excellence (CoE) is tackling.
Describe the Solution
It all comes down to people; it's going to begin and end with people. Inside KPMG Lighthouse, we divide ourselves into a half a dozen or so different roles. The Alteryx Center of Excellence within KPMG Lighthouse is primarily filled by people; data and analytics engineers. So we tend to be ETL jockeys, and data wranglers.
ALTERYX AT KPMG
- The Alteryx Center of Excellence hosts a Gallery that is freely available to everyone within KPMG U.S. They can type Alteryx into their browser, it sends them to our Gallery, it links to our Wiki on Alteryx, we're able to host self-service apps there. We do a KPMG tool kit, which is macros and apps. It is like our central hub for Alteryx!
- Team Server is the next step over. They are a service group that has their own instance of Alteryx server stood up. We're partnering with them at the beginning for install, configuration, optimization etc. And then we're stepping back, and it's growing organically, and they only call on us when there's a problem. Then we can step up and help.
Keys To A Successful Center of Excellence
People: empower line-of-business users to lead a bottom-up transformation and form a culture of innovation
Technology: architect and deploy a next-generation, self-service data platform
Solutions: build solutions to high-priority data challenges and promote new use cases
Control: establish robust CoE, technology, and data governance procedure
Training: enable users with process-specific training
The first factor to developing a strong Alteryx community and an effective Center of Excellence is people. Peoples’ jobs need to somehow be about learning the tool rather than it just being a side note. When I'm given little time to work on the Center of Excellence our performance suffers. That's when things start falling through the gaps, and that's when we find ourselves having to play catch up. You need to have someone within your organization that is dedicated to the CoE. Creating change and adoption takes work and commitment from people.
The second factor to successful adoption is technology; when we look at technology, one of the first things that stood out about our Center of Excellence was thinking about it not as a linear relationship between a Center of Excellence, and then roll out a technology. Rarely is it a linear operation, so having the CoE evaluate what the current landscape looks like; whether it's other technologies, tools, etc., or whether it's what are we doing with Alteryx already, and show us how we can improve. That's a role that the Center of Excellence can play that the business might not be able to.
And the third factor to building a successful CoE is creating Solutions; the idea that if there's a use case for Alteryx, KPMG is doing it. We use Alteryx all over the place. Three that I'm familiar with; I spend a lot of time working in finance departments right now, so we have what we call CFO Dashboard linking the feeder system and the accounting system, all the way through to the financial statement. Being able to show every level in between, and then being able to riff off that; and respond to audits off of that, and do revenue forecasting off that, and standard price modeling off of that.
The fourth factor in building a successful culture adoption is control. The Center of Excellence plays a key role in control because the business normally skips over it; reasons for skipping this part include the actual set up taking too much time, it's hard and it's an add-on. Most folks on the business side don’t consider this.
For example, we have a clever solution now that is an encrypted macro that needs to be embedded within a workflow, and it spits out maybe what you'd call metadata, or environmental variables, about who ran it, when did they run it, what version did they run? So when I'm looking at the output, I can say this is a valid controlled output and I can feel confident in the result because of the set controls.
The fifth factor I’d mention about is Training, Documentation, and knowledge transfer. The question you need to ask is, can I take this workflow and hand it to someone else? Is it documented, organized? Tool containers, comment boxes, annotations etc. You need to have the correct staff, documentation and training in order to maintain the progress you’ve made thus far. Documentation and training need to exist for multiple users and multiple functions. If not and someone leaves, the knowledge base leaves with them.
You also need to develop a successful adoption the notion of a support plan. At some point, your technology will break. Maybe not Alteryx Designer, but when you start moving into the world of Alteryx Server, Alteryx Connect, these sorts of things; you need to have a plan in place for who's going to support this? Who's going to be your Gallery admin? Do they have the needed training? What does your support plan look like going forward?
Describe the benefits you have achieved
The users get it; so the analysts, the associates, the folks munging data get Alteryx. It's a no-brainer, they love it, they use it.
The Alteryx Center of Excellence hosts a Gallery that is freely available to everyone within KPMG U.S., so if you're on the domain, you can access it. What's really neat is we have it set up that if you type Alteryx into your browser, it will redirect you to our Gallery. So when somebody hits me up in the elevator and says "How do I get Alteryx?" Or something like that, I just say "Type Alteryx into your browser". Sends them to our Gallery, it links to our Wiki on Alteryx, we're able to host self-service apps there. We do a KPMG tool kit, which is macros and apps, and that sort of stuff. So it is like our central hub for Alteryx.
We spend a lot of time discussing Pro’s and Con’s even if it's just a half hour with somebody, a leader. That goes a long way in them sponsoring, supporting, ultimately funding Alteryx usership. And that's a role that the CoE is called on, on a weekly basis, as new folks are interested in Alteryx.
Related Resources
The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found here
