I had about 3 months now to digest more what I learnt at the Tableau Conference in San Diego and in the meantime I was also invited to share the experience not only once but twice – once at a Data+Women here in the Netherlands (online) and the second time at an internal Tableau User Group at a customer I am working with. I found both experiences really enjoyable and interesting at the same time.
Pulse is at the center of the attention at the moment – people are trying to understand better how to implement it internally, what guidelines to follow, how to govern it, what is coming in the next releases (see this blog from Bibi, one of my colleagues), etc.
And I also had a bit of time to think about this: who is Tableau Pulse really for? What impact will it have?
Well, genuinely it is thought for executives, that barely have time to look at dashboards and gather insights from there. The idea is that Pulse will provide them with key metrics and because they will be embedded into their flow of work (eg mobile, slack, teams, …) then they will have the time and find value into monitoring those key metrics / kpi’s.
Now I feel that we can expand there. These people most likely never saw Tableau in their life and now they are actually looking at it and using it: this is great! Of course, this is not true for all execs. There are the ones that actually look at dashboards, that take their time and do not feel intimidated by them, but my feeling is that it is really a few people…
Most of the times, these people were almost impossible to reach and now the data world is opening to them, hence the data analysts and data teams are finally able to present their great work to those executives and they can see the value in data! And this might unlock more data projects, unlock more decisions based on data and ultimately encourage and foster a data culture in a company.
If you get their attention, then they start to care, then their direct reports will have to care as well and so on… the chain continues!
So, again Tableau Pulse can become that ultimate bridge to reach a broader audience and it will benefit everyone, not only the direct users.
Is my data ready for Pulse? That is the question many people may ask themselves. And the answer in reality is that: it can be! Of course, there are steps to take, but this can also become a strong motivator of solving whatever challenges your company might have around data.
A tip is to start with some data you trust and set it up with that, test it a bit and understand if it fits your use case.
Reach out if you want to learn more on how we can help your organization.