Tableau 2016 Conference highlights: Day one keynote address and the new Tableau 9.3

This week, over three days from 05 to 07 April, Tableau Software held a local conference that gathered Tableau practitioners and data enthusiasts from the region. Like any major conference, there were keynote addresses from major players in the data analytics field, and in between, smaller, and more targeted breakout conferences for attendees to choose from.

The first keynote address was from the folks of Tableau Software and the company has very boldly claimed that the year of 2016 will be an eventful one for the company. Vice President of Corporate Communications, Adriana Gil Miner, took to the stage and set it up JY Pook, who is the Senior Vice President of Asia Pacific, Tableau Software. He spoke about the broad strategy of the company, which is to engage, and at the same time, empower the individual worker. This is in the hopes that the worker will add value to his work. JY spoke about the ill-effects of job boredom for an individual worker, and its collective detrimental effects on the entire organization.

So in order to keep workers engaged, Tableau believes in empowering the worker, i.e., by giving them access to tools and the ability to analyze on-hand data. Besides empowering the individual worker, it allows them to value-add to their work. They can perform data analysis and subsequent data visualization to present their findings. With Tableau, they can easily share their findings with their intended audience. The level of interactivity with the visualized data can also be controlled by them, so as to suit the specific intended audience. Tableau Software's goal is to enable self-service data analysis, and in the process of such engagement with the individual worker, the employer is able to create value for the company. This is because with self-service data analysis enabled by Tableau, it puts the owner, and the other stakeholders, of the data, in a closer working relationship with the data. It is this empowerment of the individual worker that Tableau Software is seeking. With empowerment, comes greater engagement, and this in turn will, hopefully, lead to a more productive and efficient workforce!

On the local front, JY shared that Metro, a major department store, has made use of Tableau to analyze its sales data, with the hopes of boosting its bottom line. Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) has also made use of the software to uncover the mismatch in the demand and supply of public buses, which often will result in bus bunching, i.e., buses of the same service numbers arriving almost at the same time to bus stops despite being scheduled to arrive at evenly spaced time intervals. LTA has also used the software to reduce crowding and wait times for buses.

In order to perform such cutting edge data analysis, and sharing the gleaned information in visually captivating formats, the Tableau software product needs to be constantly updated in order to meet the ever-increasing data analytic needs of the market. For a start, Jesse Calderon, Senior Director, Product Development, took to the stage to expound the major highlights of the new Tableau 9.3. First of all, the database connectors of Tableau 9.3 have been updated so that users can connect to the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, a cloud warehouse that “...provides a flexible, inexpensive way to store and manage data.” This will provide Tableau users “...a fast, easy solution for exploring data at any scale.”

The other significant improvement is global map coverage as new more than a quarter of a million new data points have been added to its Geocoding Database and Tableau Map Service. Other new features and improvements include:-

• User version control for published Tableau workbooks, making it easier for restoration of earlier versions
• Easy combination or union of data tables by appending table rows. This is pertinent to Excel and other text-based data sources.
• Enhanced search capabilities Tableau Server monitoring capabilities to ensure its availability.

Also, as a result of being committed to its users, Tableau updates will now be quarterly affairs! Such planned incremental updates show the company’s emphasis on product and service refinement, even on the small stuff!

Besides the folks from Tableau Software, there were data enthusiasts like Dr. Hannah Fry, a mathematician at University College London Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis from the United Kingdom. She took to stage and shared with the raptured audience about the her first foray into the disorderly and dirty world of data, which was a stark contrast from the clean and elegant universe of mathematics that she was so familiar with. However, in the course of her work, she was exposed to fellow academics that were analyzing data and attempting to gain insights into complex social patterns. She said that data will allow you to gain new perspectives of such patterns that tend to lie beyond the grasp of traditional mathematical models.

She went on to show data visualizations of transportation usage in central London and her team of academics managed to uncover a potential choke point in a seemingly insignificant London Underground station that laid in the outskirts of the city. Her talk was kept the audience enthralled as she even spoke about how data analysis uncovered the murderous intentions of a GP in the United Kingdom. She also used data to uncover the importance of looks between genders. Her talk may seem a little haphazard initially; however, if we cut through the seeming messiness of “data” that was presented; the key point of her address was uncovering data, and making sense of it, doesn’t necessarily mean it is the end of our journey, it’s actually the beginning of discovery, and Tableau Software has good intentions to help data enthusiasts keep their data discovery journey going!

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