Alteryx Governance Without Slowing Innovation
Enterprise-grade Alteryx governance that supports growth and accountability.
What is Lifecycle Governance?
Due to the nature of Alteryx being primarily a self-service tool, it can create some potential governance challenges that are more complex than standard IT technology deployments.
As your organization’s use of Alteryx increases and becomes a more prominent line of business system, we feel it is important to consider thinking through the different Alteryx components and their “lifecycles” across people, processes and technology in order to appropriately mitigate risks and proactively avoid issues before they occur.
After observing this need across 100’s of clients, Capitalize is now offering Alteryx Lifecycle Governance services developed from our unique deep experience with Alteryx and our company’s deep knowledge in developing such methodologies.
Why Alteryx Lifecycle Governance Services?
As our Alteryx clients begin building and executing more complex workflows from multiple data sources and for multiple departments, they commonly finding themselves asking a wide array of questions across the people in the organization, the processes that they currently employ and the complimentary technologies that are leveraged:
People
- Who should have access?
- How do they get onboarded?
- How do we ensure they still need a license?
- What happens if they leave?
Process
- How do we document workflows?
- What is the change management process?
- Who owns the workflow and how do we communicate issues with them?
- How do we ensure workflows are still needed and continue to be tested if the sources/targets change?
Technology
- How do we push out desktop license/upgrades?
- What’s the process for keeping up with Server releases?
- What should we do for backup/recovery?
- What’s the process for bringing on a new, critical data source (SAP/Oracle Financials)?
Talk to Us About Your Alteryx Governance Needs
This is just a snapshot of the questions we ask to assess your organization’s Alteryx maturity and critical dependencies.
Our structured approach helps us identify governance gaps and design a tailored roadmap that delivers the most impact where it matters most to your business.
There are five key areas that make up Lifecycle Governance with Alteryx:
Our team examines each Lifecycle area to identify where you are today and make recommendations on where you should be tomorrow. These recommendations are developed in concert with client to ensure alignment on Alteryx governance goal and agreement on priorities with your organization.
The primary objective of the outcome is ensuring a “Right Sized” governance model to provide order, consistency, and oversight to ensure that you are getting the most out of Alteryx without creating unnecessary overhead.
Below we have outlined the different Alteryx Lifecycles, which is a high-level view of the functional areas that we cover in our assessment and program planning.
Alteryx Lifecycles
Onboarding
- Request license - Manager/IT approval - Deploy Alteryx to computer - Ensure License info/time stored and kept track of
Initial Training
- Alteryx.com learning paths - Formal Alteryx Training course/recording - Required certifications and timelines to complete - Assign User to certain user group/Pod
Continued Education (Designer)
- Required retraining’s cycles and timelines - Required certification management - Training and documentation on updates in Alteryx and new tools - CoE conference - Annually review user need for license - User group/pod regular meetings
Continued Education (Server)
- Admin Training - End user training - Security group permissions clearly defined and documented - Upgrade training and refreshers - CoE conference - User group/Pod regular meetings
Role Change/Separation
- Identify user to be removed - Migrate workflows/schedules to a new owner - Remove license and Alteryx from computer - Reassign license to another use (if applicable) - Annually review user need for license
Evaluate
- Location (DB, Excel, ERP…) - Integration process already exist? - Integration capabilities - Security and access setup - Data quality assessment - Data clean up requirements - Data velocity requirements - Data type consistency - Forecasted demand on data needs (processor and volume)
Publish
- Testing - Approvals - Security - Deployment - Refresh schedule
Security/Access
- How/who do I request access? - Documentation on access limits (ie cannot run a complex query) - Approvals - Regularly review/audit users security/access
Change/Update
- How/who do I request an update - Approvals - Testing - Deployment - Regularly review/audit users security/access - WAM
Decomssion/Migration
- Developer and End User survey/discussion - Approvals - Migrate existing workflows to new data source - Testing - Decommission/Archive
Idea/Specification
- Can Alteryx be leveraged? - Data source availability - Use of predictive or advanced tools? - Check repository if something similar already exists - End user(s) affected - Timeline (need by) - Data source security
Development and Testing
- Requirements and Design - Data Source Identification - Best Practices - Outputs and Presentation - Test Plan and Acceptance Tests
Migration
- Approvals - Security - Schedule - Deploy - Set up schedule job if applicable - WAM - Add to a collection/group
Deploy/Monitor
- Who is monitoring? - Notifications of failures? - Who can access/run
Change Management
- Developer and End User support - Who do I contact to update? - Approvals - Design / Development - Testing - Deployment - Document workflow updates, use meta info - WAM
Decomission/Archive
- End user survey / discussion on workflow - Testing verification - Approvals - Archive workflow - Security so no one can run/update, only admin has access
Assess Need
- Budget - Number of users - Number of use cases - Business goals alignment
Install Procedure
Default set up Install Predictive tools Best practices for setups/configurations Internal API, ODBC configurations Data permissions Additional licenses: Business Intelligence Suite, Machine Learning, Auto Insights
3rd Party Tools & Enhancements
- Macros - Data streaming configurations API, ODBC configurations - Approvals needed to test/download tools/macros/apps from Alteryx - Partner Custom tools - Enable AMP Engine - Enable Compatibility Mode - Enable more memory
Version Management
- Documented upgrade cycle - Alteryx notifications/best practices - Designer phonehome URL
Decomision/ End of Life
- User no longer using Alteryx - Migrate workflows/schedules to a different user - Remove Alteryx license and software - Annually review user need for license
Assess Need
- Number of users - Need for scheduling jobs - Budget - Centralized Repository - Business critical workflows - Security authorization and authentication mechanism (active directory, okta)
Install
- Computing requirements - Alteryx Server Pre-Req questionnaire - On prem? Cloud? - Security Integration - Admin Training - Persistence layer decision
Configuration
- Recommended user groups - Configure prioritized jobs on scheduler - Admin and end user training - Service account config - Configure database drivers and credentials - Assign data source access to specific user groups - Controller connections - Set up collections/group
Disaster Recovery
- Integration with existing DR plan - Regular DR testing and updates - Back up/refresh schedules - Back up storage - Documentation - Regenerate controller token if compromised
Scaling
- Computing requirements - Alteryx Server Pre-Req questionnaire - Budget - Workload Size - Workload execution time - # of concurrent users - Server monitoring and usage reports - # of schedule jobs. # of business-critical jobs - Scaling approach up vs out
Monitoring
- Computing requirements - Alteryx Server Pre-Req questionnaire - Alteryx notifications/best practices - Documented upgrade cycle - Server monitoring and usage reports - Review schedules and failure notifications - Designer phonehome URL - Admin Training - Review user usage
Decommission/End of Life
- Decision process and documentation - Scheduling - Back up process - Wipe data - Insert data into new server - Remove old server
Why is this important?
Lifecycle Governance is a system of checks and balances that provide a long-term program roadmap of everything from training to troubleshooting role changes and change requests. It prioritizes future objectives, while ensuring that no steps are missed that could potentially alter the functionality, productivity, or security of your Alteryx environment.
