Empowered by Data

Chapter 3Building a Data Visualization Community at the USAA

In the following chapters you will read and understand how to build a community in your organization. Before we get to that point, I want you to meet the team at USAA (United Services Automobile Association) who, at the time of writing, were at the beginning of their community journey, establishing their internal setup, and launching activities to bring like-minded people together.

Their catalyst had been the Tableau Conference, which several of their people attended. These people shared a passion for data visualization and returned home with a dream to keep that passion alive. Their first step to building their own internal data visualization community was to find champions representing various departments across USAA and to work on defining the mission that would guide their activities and initiatives.

Identifying what they wanted to accomplish and contrasting it with what they could realistically accomplish was part of the process. While the initial activities took around three months, it was time well spent, investing in the right foundations for the work to come.

Elizabeth Harwood and Sarah Coyle from USAA's Data Visualization User Group (DVUG), as their community is called, shared their story with me so that it can serve the readers of this book in supporting future analysts in their communities.

When I asked them about the key factors that helped them successfully grow their community early on, Elizabeth and ...