What is Tableau and How Can It Benefit Your Business?

Once upon a time, there was a company called Bill’s Widgets. It was the end of the second quarter, and he wanted to see how his business was doing that quarter and for the year to date. He went to his manager and asked him to see how the business was doing.

Mike, the manager, gathered up all the databases and spreadsheets for the quarter and for the year to date. He went through it with a fine-tooth comb, cleaning it up, making sure all the numbers were correct and there were no errors. He marched down the hall and handed his stack of data sheets to Doug, his data analyst. He charged Doug with exploring the data and finding insights into how the widget business did year to date and in this quarter.

Doug reviewed all the data and shared the answers to the questions and provided his thoughts on what the data was showing. They came up with a series of charts and graphs and put them all together in a report to take back to Bill. They shared their insights with Bill and his senior management.

Senior management discussed the data, reflecting on the data and the business. They set targets for the next quarter and the end of the year and shared their decisions with the rest of the staff. Everybody kept their data to share at the end of the last quarter. The loop continues.

This is one typical scenario in a business, especially one in which a data culture hasn’t been fully developed and nurtured. In this scenario, the process is slowed down because it is executed manually, the data sits in the hands of the data analyst, and it lacks the power of being able to visualize all key data points. Bill’s Widgets would benefit from enhancing their data analysis toolbelts with one tool—Tableau.

What is Tableau?

Tableau is a suite of 6 key software products designed around business intelligence and visual analytics. The goal was to improve not only the workflow of data analysis for any industry with or without technical expertise, but also takes the raw data and simplifies it visually to improve the way you see your data, empowering users at every level.

Developed in 2003, Tableau was based on a simple idea – to display and analyze any type of data in a visually powerful and more analytical manner. It allows businesses to combine data from multiple sources and collaborate around the data visualizations in real time for deeper analysis and decision-making. The powerful visualizations allow you to do a host of analytics tasks, including the discovery of trends and outliers, grouping of your data in ways that you care about and make sense for your business, organizing and reorganizing to address the questions you care about and the deeper meanings within the data sets. You can also create powerful interactive gauges and dashboards and then deploy them to critical stakeholders so data can be monitored regularly and utilized in not only big strategic planning decisions, but also day-to-day operational decisions at all levels of your organization.

Tableau is always updating and improving its products so you are ensured a product suit that is up to date and utilizing innovative and strategic data analytics tools.

How Can Tableau Benefit Your Business?

Using Tableau offers your many benefits. Because of the powerful visualizations and the ability to dig deeper into the data behind those visualizations, you can gain faster insights. There are so many ways to access, analyze, and interact with data you care about. As a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for analytics and business intelligence for over a decade, Tableau provides your company with some of the best visualizations in the industry.

Your company wants to have visibility, governance, and compliance across its analytics environment. This helps to build your data culture by providing access to critical data quickly and easily. Data can be prepared, cataloged, and kept secure so those who need it can trust the data. Additionally, because how you utilize the various products within Tableau is totally flexible, it will accommodate the choices you make while staying “agnostic to your infrastructure and industry”. Deployment is also flexible, allowing you to access your data on-premises, in the cloud, utilizing Software as a Service, or embedded within your various applications.

Because Tableau touts more than 1 million users, you have the capability to tap into the expertise of an amazing community of users that includes a wide range of industry expertise.