Cutting a 200-licence Tableau estate to 5

Tableau licences had been handed out broadly across the business. Once a licence exists it tends to stay, whether or not the person is still building anything with it, and full authoring licences are the expensive kind.

I took over managing the estate and went through it team by team. The question for each group was what they actually do with the tool: are they building and publishing, are they exploring someone else’s work, or do they just need to look at a dashboard once a month? Most people turned out to be in the third group.

That analysis produced a tiered entitlement path rather than a default of giving everyone the top licence. As reporting consolidated onto Power BI, the Tableau estate came down from around 200 licences to 5, avoiding an estimated NZ$80,000 a year in licence spend.

What the work involved

• Auditing the existing licence estate and how each licence was actually being used.
• Working through each team’s real reporting needs rather than their stated preference.
• Designing an entitlement path so licences were assigned by need, not issued by default.
• Supporting the wider consolidation of reporting onto Power BI.

The lesson I took from it: a lot of platform cost is not a technical problem, it is an unasked question about who genuinely needs what.