At our recent customer conference (TC14) Tableau CEO, Christian
Chabot, explained the difference between Tableau and traditional BI vendors by
comparing Digital Cameras to Film Cameras.
With Film Cameras, you have only a certain number of pictures you can
take, it is expensive to buy film, it is expensive to develop the film, you
need an expert to develop the film, there is a turnaround time between taking
the picture and seeing the end result. Similarly with traditional BI vendors,
it is expensive, takes time and you need an expert to build your reports and
dashboards. Also, like there has been innovation in Film Cameras (e.g. disposal
cameras) that made it more accessible to end users there have been other BI
tools that are “end user friendly” and easier to use, but they still need
experts to be involved in the process, are time consuming and expensive.
Digital cameras changed the game. They made taking pictures
accessible to anyone, you didn’t need an expert to be involved in the process
anymore and you could take as many pictures as you wanted. This unleashed
creativity, experimentation and empowered the end users. You did not think
twice about taking pictures (so you took lots of them), you kept the ones you
liked and deleted the others, you captured a lot more memories, you got instant
feedback and it even gave rise to selfies.. It also made it much easier and
faster for experts to take pictures. Tableau has done the same in the Business
Intelligence space. We have empowered the end users to be more creative,
experiment with their data and be self-reliant.
While it is unquestionable that end users are experimenting
more, being more creative and self-reliant - What about the quality of the
pictures? What about managing the pictures and deciding which one to keep? Do
you really want everyone taking pictures in every situation? If you need an
official picture whose version do you keep? This question comes up around
creating dashboards too.
The analogy here is of wedding albums (or any picture
albums). You are having a wedding and will need to create a wedding album. What
do you do? Do you have an “official photographer” or do you want all your friends
taking pictures and thus crowdsourcing your album. The answer is that you should
do both. Have the “official photographer” take the pictures that will go into
the wedding album but also have all your guests take their own pictures and
send it to you. You will end up having a much richer representation of your
wedding. You will have captured your wedding from multiple perspectives. No
matter how good your “official photographer” is, he cannot capture every moment
and every perspective. That being said, if you want to take a selfie or a picture of your kids school play, you don't need a professional photographer.
This is similar to building dashboards. If you need to
create a dashboard that a group of people need to see, then have an “official
photographer” in this case a core group (could be IT or business or business
IT) be responsible for creating the dashboard, but don’t stop there. Make the data
available to the end users. Let them do their own ad hoc analysis on the data
and look at it from their own perspectives. Chances are that some of the
analysis they do will enhance the official dashboard. They will be generating
valuable insights and providing you feedback to make your dashboards better.
There will also be many use cases, where you don’t need an
official album, in this case let the users do their own ad hoc analysis (take
their own pictures). The good news is that you will get ideas on valuable
dashboards that should be created; you empower your end users and unleash their
creativity. Most importantly, you will discover those amateur photographers
that could take that next picture or video that goes viral. This is the power
of Tableau.
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