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Improving Time-to-Insight with Elements for Tableau

Case Study

Background

One of the world’s largest multinational technology companies has a large and complex Tableau environment with many users who frequently pore over data to reveal business insights. Often, they would notice inconsistencies or irregularities in the data. To correct this, they had to go through a cumbersome process of going all the way back to the source of the data to question and update it. This required communication between different teams to identify the data warehouse with the incorrect data and ensure that the update would appear in all relevant dashboards. This communication was often a slow process that took place over email.

Practice Areas

  • Data Visualization
  • Software Engineering
  • Business Intelligence

Business Impact

  • Improved time-to-insight

Challenges

  • Cumbersome data review process
  • Need for increased dashboard-based cooperation
  • Enterprise-grade security and scalability requirements

Technologies

  • Tableau
  • .Net
  • Angular

Challenge

To reduce time-to-insight, our client wanted to enable its Tableau users to write back to the data source, annotate the data and discuss the data point directly from the Tableau dashboard itself. In addition, any eventual solution needed to promote the adoption of Tableau-based cooperation across the company, while offering enterprise-grade security, access management, resource separation and integration with their existing infrastructure.

Solution

When analyzing the challenge, it became clear that Elements for Tableau, Starschema’s enterprise-class write-back and dashboard collaboration platform for Tableau Desktop, Server and Online would be a suitable candidate to base a solution upon. As a flexible Tableau dashboard extension that can be configured and customized to meet specific needs of the most demanding enterprises, Elements integrated directly with the client’s existing directory service and network infrastructure to offer a complete write-back solution hosted on-premises. Additionally, there was a need to optimize Elements to the client’s use case to avoid fragmenting relevant data set into silos for each team. To solve this, we created a central database for all annotations across the various teams. This enabled more streamlined cooperation, while maintaining the required enterprise-grade access and permission controls.

Outcome

The client realized an immediate improvement in the time it took to resolve data accuracy questions and change data points in Tableau. Another notable result was that conversations about data insights, both within and between teams, increased overall and took place directly in the dashboards. Usage of Elements for Tableau scaled up 500% in the second half of the year of adoption compared to its initial deployment, onboarding a total of nine organizations across the company. During the same period, usage of Tableau inside the company increased by 34%, as Elements helped Tableau become an even more integral part of the decision-making process. The collaboration options that Elements enables now directly inform the design of new dashboards, leading to even faster insights and more engaging dashboards.