Workflow Admin Manager (WAM): How to Solve for Alteryx External Audit and IT Efficiency

Alteryx has established itself as a leading platform for data preparation, blending, and advanced analytics. However, with great power comes great responsibility. As Alteryx empowers Citizen Developers and Citizen Data Scientists to automate mission-critical use cases that directly impact a company’s financial operations and reporting, it is crucial to manage and govern this powerful tool effectively. This responsibility includes demonstrating readiness for external audits and control activities to mitigate risks associated with data handling and compliance. 

To address these challenges, we developed Workflow Admin Manager (WAM), which serves as the mission control center for your Alteryx environment. WAM not only facilitates streamlined workflow management, but also ensures that your data processes are transparent and auditable. By providing the necessary oversight and governance, WAM helps organizations harness the full potential of Alteryx while maintaining compliance and minimizing risk. 

Check out the video above, which is a snippet from our recent webinar on Governing and Scaling Alteryx Workflows with Transparency and Control, offering a demo of WAM’s capabilities. 

WAM Features and Functions 

WAM is not just another tool in your IT arsenal – it unlocks 100% of your Alteryx environment, by providing full visibility into every aspect of your workflows, data sources, and user activities. Here’s how WAM stands out:  

  • Administration Functionality: WAM offers a suite of tools designed to make life easier for system administrators and IT owners. This includes global search, find-and-replace functionalities, and the ability to manage environment migrations such as pushing workflows from test to production environments. 
  • Environment Management Migration: Seamlessly move workflows between environments, ensuring your production environment is always up to date and free from errors. 
  • Server Optimization and Performance Monitoring: WAM enables IT administrators to monitor Alteryx server performance, ensuring that it’s connected and has access to all necessary systems and sources. This not only helps maintain optimal performance, but also reduces downtime and inefficiencies. 
  • Process Controls, Audit Documentation, and Access Reporting: WAM provides the tools necessary for process control, audit documentation, and access reporting, which are crucial for maintaining governance standards.

Comprehensive Health Checks 

One of WAM’s standout features is its ability to perform a comprehensive health check of your Alteryx environment. This feature extracts and analyzes metadata from your Alteryx environment, providing you with a high-level overview and actionable insights. 

  • Health Check Report: The health check report gives you a summary of all the critical information in your Alteryx environment. It highlights key areas like user activity, workflow executions, and permissions, providing a quick snapshot of your environment’s overall health. 
  • Optimization Opportunities: WAM identifies optimization opportunities, such as high-density executions and inefficient workflows, allowing IT teams to fine tune the system for better performance. 
  • Access Review and Permissions Management: With WAM, you can easily conduct access reviews to ensure that the right people have the right access to critical workflows and data. This is especially important for maintaining compliance.

Governance and Documentation 

Governance is a critical component of any analytics environment, and WAM provides robust tools to ensure your Alteryx environment is always audit-ready. 

  • Classifying High-Risk vs. Low-Risk Assets: WAM helps you classify assets based on their risk level, ensuring that high-risk workflows and data sources are given the appropriate level of scrutiny. 
  • Audit and Documentation Reports: WAM generates detailed audit and documentation reports, which are essential for proving that your control environment is functioning as intended. These reports are invaluable during external audits and internal reviews. 
  • Workflow Version Change Reports: WAM allows you to track and report on any changes made to workflows, providing a clear audit trail and ensuring that changes are properly managed. 
  • Detailed Workflow Analysis and Reporting: WAM offers deep insights into what your workflows are doing, who has access to them, and how data is being transformed. This level of detail is crucial for both ongoing maintenance and audit readiness. 

Conclusion 

In a world where data is king, maintaining a secure, efficient, and audit-ready analytics environment is non-negotiable. Workflow Admin Manager (WAM) is your solution for ensuring that your Alteryx environment is not only efficient, but also fully governed and ready for any audit. By leveraging WAM, organizations can enhance their governance, documentation, and reporting capabilities, ultimately optimizing their Alteryx workflows and environment for the future.  

Investing in WAM is not just about meeting today’s needs; it’s about preparing your organization for the challenges of tomorrow.