The Amazing cOoking Machine - Raw Food Experiment - Chapter 3

Access to raw food unleashed some cooking creativity on Wastosie. While the Wastosians did not know how to cook or did not have the utensils, they started experimenting. A few handful of Wastosians actually became pretty good at cooking while most just had fun. Some even ate the food raw!!!

Around that time another group of inventors came up with a new version of the cooking factory that made 'Beau' obsolete. This new factory took only 6 months to build, but it required fewer experts to run and could now generate food packets daily and at a lower cost!!! The clincher was that it could meet the needs of many palettes. While it could not meet every individual’s needs, it could take the people’s input and prepare many versions of the food packet.



The people loved the speed of this new factory and named it 'Quick'. This led to the second national holiday being announced on the planet. Food was plentiful, there was variety and the cost to run it was lower.

King W decided to stop providing the people raw food as he thought he had met their need for variety, but a strange thing happened. There was an uproar. The Wastosians (especially a small vocal bunch) really wanted access to the raw food. While they appreciated the frequent food delivery and the variety, they wanted to experiment. This was puzzling  to King W as he had assumed that the people would prefer his high quality meals from 'Quick' rather than their cooking experiments, but that wasn't the case. There were quite a few people
who loved their experiments and the freedom to cook whenever they wanted and whatever they wanted. This group of Wastosians were called 'Chefs'.

King W sent out his advisers to talk to the 'Chefs'. They were tasked with finding out what the 'Chefs' were cooking and why they wanted to cook rather than just eat the food packets. What King W's advisers found out was that while the 'Chefs' were still consuming the food packets, they also had the need to augment the food packets with their own cooking. Groups of 'Chefs' would get together and have 'Meeting Parties

(MPs)'. MPs were a new concept at Wastosie that had only come about in the last few years, once people started experimenting with cooking. In a MP, They would get together and share what had been cooked and everyone would discuss how to make the food better. King W could not really grasp why anyone would have an MP, but since they weren't bothering anyone, he decided to leave them be.

The Amazing cOoking Machine - 'Beau' To The Rescue - Chapter 2

A few years went by and everyone got used to the monthly food packet and guess what!!! Now they wanted more. They wanted food twice a month!! They were not happy eating one month old stale food. This was not an easy problem to solve. 'Beau' had not been created to send out the food packet more than once a month and any changes to 'Beau' was going to cost a lot of money.
King W wanted to keep the Wastosians happy and agreed to a big upgrade to 'Beau'. After a year and many tests and problems, the changes were rolled out and 'Beau' started sending out food packets twice a month.

King W was ecstatic. He was sitting on this throne, thinking back to the time when there was no food on Wastosia and how in the last 10 years, they had come so far. He was looking forward to enjoying the next few years and relaxing. The euphoria from this new upgrade lasted a few measly months, before the Wastosians started complaining about the lack of variety in the food. They all got the same food and now that they had developed a taste for food they wanted the ability to change a few things in the food packet. Some wanted it spicier, some wanted other ingredients. How quickly things change. They had all forgotten the days before the cooking factory when they were always hungry, but that is the price we pay for progress.

Solving this problem was impossible with 'Beau' and so King W called his trusted advisers and asked them to come up with a solution. After many months of deliberation and argument,a decision was reached. This wasn't a unanimous decision, as some advisers felt that this was giving too much
power to the people, while others wanted to empower the people. In the end, to keep the Wastosians happy, King W decided to make the raw food available to any Wastosian who wanted it. Anyone who wanted a bit more variety could get access to some raw food and they could do whatever they wanted.

The Amazing cOoking Machine - The Hungry Immortals - Chapter 1

Once upon a time, many many years ago in a galaxy far far away, was a small purple planet called Wastosie (pronounced Waste-O-See). On this planet lived an immortal race; the
Wastosians. The Wastosians were very good inventors and constantly building gadgets but there was one little problem. The planet itself was barren and no food grew on it and the people were always hungry. Imagine being immortal and hungry all the time!!! Needless to say, they weren't a happy lot.

All this changed when an alien spacecraft stopped by with a group of very weird looking explorers. These explorers were lost and had landed on Wastosie by mistake. These alien explorers talked about their home planet Flabocurry. The Curry-men as they called themselves were quite roly-poly. They talked about a time many centuries ago when Flabocurry had also started out as a barren planet and how they had solved their hunger problem by building a cooking factory.

The Wastosian King, King W, pleaded with the visitors to leave some seeds, soil and building plans, so they could build a cooking factory on Wastosie. The Curry-men were a friendly bunch and were glad to help out.

Soon the biggest transformational project on Wastosie was under way. All

the experts from the planet were brought together and the factory was built. It was a self-sustaining factory that grew the raw food, cooked it and delivered it to every house on Wastosie. People loved the factory so much that they called it 'Beau' (pronounced Bee-O). Once a month a packet of cooked food would be delivered to each person. The day the first food packet was sent out was declared a national holiday. The Wastosians were thrilled. They had been starving and now once a month they got their food delivered to their doorsteps.

Can a Business Intelligence product make you curious, creative and innovative?

I often get asked by customers - Why Tableau? What they are really asking is - I have spent all this money on other BI tools, why do I need another one or your alternatives are free, why should I spend money with you. I posted earlier about how Tableau is like a digital camera while other tools are like film cameras. The picture below captures my thoughts on this topic.

So, if Tableau is like a digital camera, the question comes about - where is the proof that this self reliance has driven people to be more curious, creative and innovative. We see this with digital cameras - it gave rise to sites like Flickr / YouTube, you can see the display of creativity on these websites. What about Tableau?

Well Tableau has Tableau Public - a place for folks to share their visualizations with the public. You can see the display of creativity, enthusiasm and fun regular people are having visualizing data. That being said, if we consider the Selfie to be the ultimate form of self expression, what does Tableau Public have?

To answer that, I will leave you with the entries for the Quantified Self Viz Contest. Check it out for yourself -

Governed Dashboards vs Ad Hoc Analysis – Think Wedding Albums

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. 

What happened to the Librarians?

In my earlier post (click here) on a hypothetical internet with no search engine, we talked about a world if there had been no Google and the innovations that we would have lost. A question was posed - What happened to the Librarians? Did Google make the Librarians jobless?

The librarians had a tough job. They knew that there was no way there were going to be able to keep up with the number of requests coming in. They also knew that the more questions they answered the more questions were going to come up. In addition, for them to do a good job, the users had to provide enough detail and context about the questions. Without the detail and context, it was easy to misinterpret the questions. It did not matter how hard they worked or how good they were, they could never make their users happy. In fact, if they were really good, it just meant that the number of questions went up and their response times went up. It was a vicious cycle that could not lead to success.

In the above hypothetical context, the librarians were happy when Google came along. The users could now ask their own questions. There was a job that still needed highly skilled resources - SEO specialists. They could now make sure that the content was presented in a way that would show up on Google. This job was much more enjoyable and challenging and higher paying. It was also something the Librarians were good at (it dealt with indexing and organizing content).

Similarly, in today's organizations. The teams that are responsible for building the reports aren't really that excited about creating charts and graphs and making the reports just right (getting every pixel perfect). It is a thankless job as you can never design the perfect report. Each user is different and based on their context / perspective, they want to see the data just that little differently. Given a choice, they would much rather focus on the job of making the organization's data available and accessible. This is a much more challenging and rewarding job. It is also something they have the skills for. Lastly, this now changes the dynamic between the two groups. It is a much more symbiotic relationship with both sides adding value.

So, Self Service Business Intelligence, does not do away with IT, instead it allows highly skilled IT resources to focus on the harder problem of making the data available, accessible, secure and governed while the end users can ask all the questions they want. If there is a question that is not answered by the data, they can now go back to IT and IT can work on making the new data set accessible. This is a much more agile process that allows organizations to react to the fast changes going on around them.

In this new world everyone wins. The organizations now have users that are curious, ask questions of their data and find insights that drive innovations. Highly skilled IT resources focus on the data and making it accessible. The organizations benefit because you now have users and IT aligned, each respecting each other and driving value. You have meetings where IT and business work together and the IT team gets a standing ovation from the users for the value they deliver. If you think that last part is hypothetical, you are quite mistaken. This is a reality at a lot of Tableau customers... Check out this post (click here)

Imagine the internet without Google..

The year is 1998. Content is exploding on the internet. Websites are popping up all over the place. But there is one little wrinkle - there is no Google, no search engines to search the information on the internet. The only way users can get their questions answered is to go to their local library. The Librarian requires you to fill out a form with all the details on the topic you want to learn about and ask questions. You have to make sure you think through all your questions beforehand. You submit your request and a week later you have your answers. You realize that some questions were misinterpreted, some answers led you to ask more questions, so you sit down to fill out the form again and wait another week. As more people have questions, the Librarians are overworked and now it takes a month to get your questions answered. You make sure you only ask the most important questions.

In case you think this is a hypothetical scenario. Just look at the organizations you work in. The year is 2014. Data is exploding. Every system, person, machine is generating data. There is one little wrinkle. The only way users can get their questions answered is to go to their Report Factory. The team running the Report Factory, requires you to provide all your questions upfront. They need this to be able to get you the answers as they don't know the context to your questions. It takes them a couple weeks to return with your answers (as they are busy with the many requests coming in). They use a language called SQL and work with cubes/universes. It is very complicated. When you look at the reports created for you, you realize that some questions were misinterpreted (as the report creator did not completely understand the context to your question), some reports led you to ask more questions. You start this process again and get ready to wait another couple weeks. As data grows, more people have questions and the 2 weeks now takes 2 months. It is easier to make decisions on gut feel than wait for the data.

If there had been no Google, no Search Engine - we would not have had any blogs (why create something when it is so difficult for people to find it), we would stop being curious (no more being the smart guy in the party who has the answer to the most obscure question), there would not have been a Facebook or a Twitter or a Flicker or YouTube (why create something when no one can find it), there would not have been the need for an iPhone or an iPad (why have a device when you can't find any relevant content)..

Imagine what your Organization is losing out by not having Self Service Business Intelligence. By not allowing your end users, the people who care about the data, an easy way to access and understand data in your enterprise - you are stifling their curiosity, you are losing competitive insight, you are preventing the next innovation from taking off in your organization, you are losing your change agents, you are being left behind.

So if you ask me.. is there a Google for the data in your enterprise.. my answer is YES.. and it is Tableau.. Come see how we are changing the lives of our customers and why they are passionate about a piece of software that has given them a purpose, a voice and a means to change their lives.

In case you are wondering what happened to the Librarians. Check out my follow on post (click here).