Kicking off Tableau Conference Europe with a Blueprint for data culture, platform innovations, and more

Today, we kicked off our sixth year of Tableau Conference Europe with our Tableau customers, partners, and amazing community—to talk data culture and exciting new additions to the Tableau platform. It's all driven by our guiding mission to help people see and understand data—to decipher fact from fiction, to create a community of shared knowledge, and to help people move onto their next breakthrough, faster.

James Eiolart, Senior Vice President of Tableau EMEA, jump-started the conference by exploring parallels between lasting cultures throughout our history and cultures of data within modern organizations. He explained three key traits of lasting cultures: they have a shared language, they have a way to share, and they are adaptive.

First, cultures can’t survive without a common language. From gestures to symbols to words, we use language to communicate and align on common goals. In a Data Culture, leaders must invest in creating a data literate workforce where people use data as their common language to make an impact. James used the example of a commercial real estate firm, JLL who attributed $35 million in benefits from creating a data literate workforce.

Over the course of history, our ancestors came together to share stories, experiences and knowledge, and together they gathered new wisdom. We see this community of sharing echoed in Tableau communities, where people continue to inspire, support, and lift each other up. Community is the heart of an organization’s Data Culture, bringing people together under a shared mission.

Lasting cultures are adaptive, evolving to meet the changing needs of the environment. This means that cultures build the rules and guardrails needed to establish a balance between freedom and regulation. This is also true in modern organizations where an effective Data Culture means you have the right balance between governance and access.

Homa Siddiqui, Head of Digital Transformation and Product Labs at Credit Suisse, shared some of the successes and challenges Credit Suisse has experienced in their journey to build a Data Culture. It started as a top-down mandate from senior leadership, but it quickly grew because of the excitement on the ground—all supported by buy-in and advocacy from leaders across the organization. Homa reinforced that data ubiquity is a must when it comes to the future of the banking industry and modern business in general.

James then announced the new Tableau Blueprint—your step-by-step guide to building the capabilities you need to cultivate a Data Culture and accelerate organizational change. We created Tableau Blueprint by bringing together best practices from tens of thousands of organizations around the world. Adam shared how we’ve found that technology is only one part of a successful Data Culture. Focusing on your people, to drive behavior change ensuring they are making decisions with data is what will make your data culture successful. Learn more about Tableau Blueprint.

Chief Product Officer, Francois Ajenstat, highlighted upcoming Tableau platform innovations and made a few announcements along the way, including the upcoming Tableau 2019.3 beta. Francois shared how we’re doubling down our innovations in three core areas.

Analytics for everyone: Ask Data and AI-powered Explain Data
Analytics for everyone means that every person within your organization feels empowered to make decisions based on data. Earlier this year, we released Ask Data, letting you ask questions of your data in a conversational and intuitive way. And now we’re announcing Explain Data, coming in Tableau 2019.3, which leverages the power of artificial intelligence to provide explanations for unexpected values in your data. With Explain Data, you can answer “why” faster and discover insights you may have never found before.

Analytics at scale: Project McKinley, encryption at rest
As more and more people use data within your organization, there’s a greater need to manage analytics at scale. We continue to develop new enterprise features that make this easier, including encryption at rest for extracts, enabling organizations to store sensitive data in the platform, while minimizing the risk of access by unauthorized users. Francois also introduced Project McKinley, which provides enhanced security, manageability, and scalability capabilities for Tableau Server. With Project McKinley, its simpler to run large, mission-critical Tableau Server deployments, allowing you to react to the changing needs of your business, and to save time by streamlining the management process. It will be a separately licensed add-on for Tableau Server, and we’ll continue to add more capabilities with every release.

Analytics built on trusted data with Tableau Catalog
A successful analytics environment must be built on trusted and accurate data. That’s why we’re excited to announce Tableau Catalog! As part of the Data Management Add-on, Tableau Catalog makes it easy to get a complete view of the data being used in Tableau. Data owners can automatically track information about the data (i.e., metadata), including user permissions, usage metrics, and lineage. There’s no need to set up indexing schedules, configure connectivity or reset permissions—it’s all done automatically.

Explain Data, Project McKinley and Tableau Catalog will be available in the Tableau 2019.3 beta, coming soon! Join our beta program to try these new capabilities.

There were so many jaw-dropping moments today and we’re excited for even more over the course of these next few days. We can’t wait to see what you accomplish with these new innovations.