Tableau: What is the benefit of “liberating data” and enabling self-service business intelligence?
Steve Roy, IT Director: We're not thinking about how we're going to do things, we're thinking of what can we show people that helps them be effective. And that's kind of a quantum leap.
Keith Rabin, President: My primary goal is to make everyone at the company as effective doing their job every day as they possibly can be.
I think we've realized over time that centralizing all of that data and trying to have one centralized group come up with all of the data-driven decision making just no longer works. And it's slow, too—it's extraordinarily slow.
So we have to drive that decision-making and that power down to our managers, and they have to ultimately be responsible for it. In order to do that, you have to give them a tool that allows them to take these big data sets that come from different systems and different databases and be able to connect them all together and see the data that they need to see to make their decisions.
Steve: Trying to deliver effective KPIs for the organization has been, you know, the Holy Grail for our organization for a number of years. And it really is ‘the secret sauce’ for most organizations.
And we believe that we've achieved that. People are rallying around the visualizations that we've created, and they understand what's going on with the business.
Kevin Cape, Manager, Corporate Soul: In order to connect to people, to the impact that they're having, you have to be able to measure that. You have to be able to show what that impact is.
We're able to look at those boards every day and see what's happening and think about what we're doing on the front lines and how our tasks relate to that.
We're able to filter things up and say, "Hey, you know, I saw this, I had this experience. And based on what I see on the boards, I think we can improve in this way."
We wanted to liberate the data and get it out to our users. And the way that we did that was through Tableau Cloud. I'm not having to worry about firewalls and configuring things correctly. It's there in the cloud, secure for my key executives to access anytime—even on a JetSuite aircraft at 40,000 feet.
Tableau: What made you choose the hosted version of our Server product, Tableau Cloud?
Steve: The concept of being mobile and accessing data is what it's all about these days. We wanted to liberate the data and get it out to our users. And the way that we did that was through Tableau Cloud.
I'm not having to worry about firewalls and configuring things correctly. It's there in the cloud, secure for my key executives to access anytime—even on a JetSuite aircraft at 40,000 feet.
To go out and find the talent, purchase the equipment, get everything up and running, the time to delivering the solution just wasn't realistic on the timeline that we had.
Tableau Cloud just made a lot of sense for us. We could get there quicker, we could get there faster, and really at about the same price.
With Tableau Cloud we're able to focus on the actual reporting pieces of it. We don't have to maintain the servers and offer IT support in that role.
Tableau: As an analyst, what do like about having Tableau?
Matt Waterman, Mission Support Analyst: It gives us the ability to devote that much more time to our end users and really focus on the data itself.
Right off the bat (it was) very easy to use, was able to get all kinds of results in literally days, which was amazing. We were using some other tools to do that and it took a matter of weeks or months to even compile that data, and (with Tableau) we were able to do that in a quarter—if not less—of the time. The senior level executives were just astounded.
Tableau: Can you describe the importance of helping people to better understand and connect with data through visualization?
Kevin: Transparency in the data is about knowing what's actually going on in the business. It becomes participatory and it allows people to connect their work to their meaning and to the progress of the business.
As human beings, we look at numbers and they're symbols that just aren't as meaningful. They don't have that same oomph. And when something is visual, when you can see a visual gap in a chart, there's a loss aversion there that you look at and you say, "Oh, we've got to close that gap, there's something meaningful about those two lines touching."
Tableau: It sounds like Tableau has become a major part of how you do business, then—would you agree?
Keith: The first thing I do in the morning when I wake up is pull up my e-mail and there are three reports that Tableau has generated in there. And they're the three critical metrics of our business. And it's the first thing I do is look at them and determine if there's any decisions that need to be made from them. And if there are, I probably call our CEO, Alex, and we talk about it.
There's all kinds of decisions that are happening faster. I would say more accurate. And those are the things you have to have in business today.