Tableau - A grassroots movement changing organizational culture..

Working at Tableau I have had the firsthand experience of seeing organizational transformation from the ground up. Individuals / middle managers / teams etc. irrespective of their title or authority are changing the culture at large multinational organizations. This has been eye opening and fascinating to watch. Groups / individuals by leveraging Tableau feel empowered to change the status quo. They feel relevant and are able to make a difference. Slowly but steadily, through word of mouth, the change begins.

Having never witnessed anything like this in all my years in software, I've been very curious on whether this is  a new phenomenon or is there a precedence to this.

I started by looking back at how transformation has traditionally occurred in Organizations. Most transformations were always top down.

They followed the McKinsey's 7S model

  

or

Kotler's 8 Step Process



The challenge with these models was usually in getting people to change, these transformations were expensive, they took a long time and were not always successful. We always talked about People, Process, Technology and while companies might figure out the Technology and Process, the People part was always tricky. People don't like change. They don't like being told my management about what to do.

At Tableau our customers have reversed this and made it more of a bottoms up process. This got me to thinking - Is there another option for businesses as far as organizational change goes. The answer, seems to be yes. Being curious about this phenomena, I spent some time doing research into what causes grassroots movements, what is changing in our society that makes this possible today and how can organizations apply this.

Here are my thoughts -

1. Tableau has been adopted by the masses because it aligned closely with the beliefs of the end user (not just IT or executives). These were the actual people affect by the change. - Check out this video by Simon Sinek that talks about this phenomenon.

2. We are in a time in society where end users are looking to be empowered, looking to connect with like minded people and want to change the status quo. Tribes are changing society. We've heard people say that Tableau users are passionate about Tableau. This is because they are like minded people that are changing the BI status quo at organizations. Tribes are the new change agent.

3. So if organizations want to know how movements start, here is a good example of one in action. The key point to remember though, is that if it does not align with the beliefs of the tribe, it will just be a fad and the masses will move on to the next bright shiny object.

So what does this mean for organizations? How do they create their own Grassroots movements?

There is no easy answer for this. The advantage that Tableau has, is that we have nailed the Process and Technology part of the People/Process/Technology triumvirate. We've created software that any end user can relate to and use with minimal support. We fit extremely well into existing processes (you can connect to your Excel workbooks and get going immediately). We do things 10x better/faster than the status quo, so the users are willing to make the change. The impact is obvious. Once the end users start using Tableau, they want to talk to others in their tribe, show off their creations and thus the movement starts. First with the Innovators and then with the Early Adopters and soon the Early Majority.

Would love to hear other cases where Technology was able to start a grassroots movement in your organization..

Tableau vs Spotfire vs QlikView - Which tool is targeted at business users

Three vendors stand out in the Visual Analytics space - Spotfire / QlikView and Tableau. They all solve the same problem - help end users visually analyze data by making users self reliant and reducing dependence on IT to create reports.

The question is - Do these tools meet the criteria for Self Reliance by business users or do they still need IT to create reports (maybe less than the traditional BI tools like SAP, Cognos, Oracle).

I tried to answer this question by going to Amazon and searching for books on these 3 tools and here are the top 4 results for each. I'll let you make your own judgement (check out who these books are written for) -

Your relationship with Data - From Fear to Curiosity, power of the little Undo button

When it comes to data I seem to find people fall on a spectrum that goes from fear/hatred to indifference to curiosity. It is not surprising that a lot of people are plain indifferent to data. They are much more comfortable making decisions based on intuition and half-hearted analysis.

Then there is a group that has no choice but have to work with data and they are either scared of data (they hide behind the 'I'm not really good with data') or hate their work because it involves data.

The last category are the ones that proudly call themselves as data geeks. They thrive with data. This post is targeted more towards the first group - the ones that hate / fear data.

How much of that fear / hate is brought about by the technology they use? I had done a post a couple months ago about how, when you give an expert the wrong technologies they become average and when you give the average person the right technology they become an expert. What I've figured out over the last couple months, is that when you give an average person the wrong technology you create fear / hatred.

I was with a customer the other day and they were gushing about the undo button in Tableau. All along, I knew it was cool having an undo button but what struck me was that this customer actually went from fear of working with data to joy because of this one little button. They went from one end of the spectrum to the other.

They talked about how before Tableau, if they made a mistake in building out their dashboard, they had to start from scratch. So over time, the product they used had trained them to be scared and killed all curiosity. They never deviated from the exact same steps every time. There would be times they wanted to experiment a bit but the thought of having to start from scratch, killed that thought.

Now with Tableau, they feel freed. They can experiment with their data, be curious, go down various paths of analysis and if they don't like something they just keep hitting the undo button till they come back to a state they were happy with.

Who knew that the little undo button could move someone from fear to curiosity..

Tableau Dashboards on iPad - Embedded Javascript to get scrollbars

The iPad (iOS) does not support iFRAMES. So if you have a website where you've embedded a Tableau dashboard in an iFRAME (see my previous post), when you look at it on an iPad, it will be expanded to fit the entire width of the dashboard. Your height / width parameters in the iFRAME will be ignored. If you are ok, with your dashboard being expanded (no scrollbars around the iFRAME) then you are good.

Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with Tableau. This will happen with any iFRAME webpage.

There are cases where you want to keep it to a certain height and width. This post shows how you can do that, but you cannot use an iFRAME. You will have to take the SCRIPT tag that Tableau generates and embed it into the code of your webpage.

What you need to do is after the <SCRIPT> </SCRIPT> tag entry add the following div tag -

<div id="wrapper" style="-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; height: 100%; overflow: auto; width: 100%;">
then at the end of all the Tableau generated div, put your closing </div> tag.

This will now allow you to keep your dashboard within a certain height / width and you will get scroll bars on your iPad. Test this viz out to see how it looks on an iPad. I specifically created a really bad dashboard that has multiple scrollbars within the dashboard and really long and wide, so you can see the scrollbars.

btw. the scrollbars inside the dashboard work even when you have an iFRAME.

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Tableau Dashboards on an iPad - Using iFRAMES

The iPad (iOS) does not support iFRAMEs. So if you have a Tableau Viz in an iFRAME on your website and you view it on an iPad, you will see that your height and width are ignored and the dashboard is expanded to take over the entire screen. You can view it on a browser on your computer to see the difference. On your computer, the dashboard is kept within the height and width and you get the vertical and horizontal scrollbars. On an iPad it gets expanded. That being said, any scrollbars within the dashboard are still scrollable on the iPad.

Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with Tableau. This will happen with any iFRAME webpage.

In the example below, I set the height and width of the iFrame to 400 / 400, to exaggerate the effect. This is a really bad dashboard from a view-ability standpoint, but it is useful to get the point across. When you view this on an iPad, it starts out as 400 x 400 but when it finishes rendering it gets blown up to fit the entire visualization.

Tableau - The Jetsons Spacecar of BI Tools - Infographic

I had written a blog post some time back about how I considered Tableau to be the Jetsons Spacecar of BI tools. I was never really happy with how verbose it was and how long it took in words to get my point across. Been thinking about "visualizing" it. You know the saying - A picture paints a thousand words and in line with what Tableau stands for - A visual representation of your data leads to faster insights. So here is my attempt to create an infographic. I'll let you decide which is better..

Vacation anyone?

I was looking at a graphic that had details on all the top airlines, airports and routes flown to in 2012. It was quite interesting. One of the things that stood out was that Denver airport, was in the top 5 on all 3 categories - Distance flown, Passengers and destinations flown to. Then again, considering that it is centrally located, it does make sense. The New York airports were conspicuous in their absence, but considering that there are 3 airports to choose from, cannibalization explains that anomaly. Another interesting tidbit, if we look at which airlines are flying out of the top airport (by # of unique destinations), SkyWest Airlines stands out. Who knew it would be in the top 5 for each of the 5 airports. Maybe because it is a regional carrier, it covers a lot of local routes. That is something worth looking into though.

So all this looking at flight data (see below for the visual)

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got me thinking about going on vacation.

Which brought on new questions - So what are the top places people are flying to, what airlines fly into those places and which of the airlines are the most punctual.

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once I narrowed down to an airline, I was really curious on what the top 3 routes flown by that airline was

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and once I saw this and with things getting cold in NY, I decided to fly to San Juan on Jetblue.. joining me?

it is fun to play around with data (data source transtats.bts.gov)