Delivering analytics into the flow of business: The Tableau innovation vision

You’ve heard it before—and you’ll hear it again—but it’s worth repeating: The world has changed. Business has changed, too. Digital transformation is everywhere, and everything is digital. This is the future, and we’re not turning back.

In this all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, data has never been more important. At the core, every digital transformation is a data transformation. Every company is a data company, every person is a data person, and every process is a data process. The pandemic further highlighted that speed, agility, and empowerment are critical to success—and companies that embrace a data culture adapt, learn, and deliver more value than those that don’t. 

At Tableau, we believe that data is the lifeblood of an organization. It’s why we’ve remained focused on helping people see and understand their data. When we first ushered in the era of self-service analytics, we’d occasionally hear, Why? Why does everyone in my organization need access to data? Why do I need to empower business users? Why does a data culture matter? 

We don’t hear why anymore. The business case for data-driven decision-making has already been made. Now we’re asked a different question: How?

How do we get more value from our data? 

How can we enable self-service analytics with governance? 

How do we infuse data-driven decision-making across the organization? 

How do we create a data culture?

That’s what fuels our innovation at Tableau—we want to accelerate your success by transforming how you work with data. We want to help everyone make better decisions, faster and turn data into action. 

How? By putting analytics into the flow of business. Let’s talk about that data future … and the technologies we’re building in Tableau to help you get there.

Manage all of your data with a single pane of glass

With this explosion of digital transformation, we hear a common pain point: Our data explosion has devolved into data chaos! 

Organizations are drowning in data and starving for insights. There’s more data than ever before, coming in faster and faster. At the same time, this flood of data must be cataloged, curated, cleaned, and governed to enable trusted data at scale. 

This struggle might sound familiar. Perhaps you’re swimming in data, too, and fear getting lost in the chaos. 

You want to know how. How to make data easier for people to discover. How to know which data is trusted and which data to rely on for decision making. How to get a unified view of your disparate data sources or how to approach data that’s not yet migrated to the cloud. 

To tame the data chaos, you need a single, unified view across all of your enterprise data. We are building a single pane of glass in Tableau to give you a full picture of your data, help you govern it, and provide an all-up view of the business. We want to empower you to centrally connect, catalog, clean, curate, and secure your data no matter where it lives—in Tableau, the Salesforce Customer 360, or anywhere in the enterprise. It’s trusted data at scale. 

Analytics where you work

People work differently today. They spend their time in collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and they work within business applications optimized to streamline business processes. 

Traditionally, the analytics that people need to do their jobs exist elsewhere. That disconnect forces users to leave their tools to get data insights, losing business context and resulting in the ultimate swivel chair problem. We want to end that inefficiency by delivering insights directly within the tools that people use every day. Insights that are contextual to the task at hand and drive action. 

That’s why we’re bringing analytics everywhere—in collaboration tools, in Salesforce, embedded in any application—to the users who need them, where and when they need them. Think of data as a trusted teammate who proactively tells you when there is a problem, instantly answers your questions, and helps you automate business processes to close the loop from insight to action. We’re putting analytics within the flow of business to make data contextual, predictive, and actionable for any user, anywhere. 

This will change not only how you interact with your data—it will unlock the full value of data to you and your business. 

Smarter analytics for everyone powered by AI 

We’ve established that success in this data-driven world requires everyone to be a data person, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a data scientist. We’re helping business teams do more analysis themselves with Tableau Business Science.  

Don’t get me wrong: I love data science. But it’s out of reach for so many. It’s complex, specialized, expensive, and hard to scale. Data scientists are in high demand and while data-science projects deliver incredible value, they aren’t quick or inexpensive. 

In order for you and everyone else to put data to work, we must make analytics more powerful and even easier to use for more people. Business Science does just that. It puts data science techniques and AI into the hands of business experts. 

By democratizing AI, just as we democratized analytics, Tableau is enabling business experts and teams to analyze and better answer their own questions, anywhere those questions arise. 

For example, we’ve gotten pretty good at using data to tell us what happened. But looking backward isn’t enough. We must also look ahead to predict and understand what comes next. Adding predictive analytics to Tableau will uplevel any analytics strategy. Powerful AI tools that were once limited to specialized data scientists are now within reach of the business user. You can pair your business smarts with data science capabilities like custom predictive models, simulation and scenario planning, clustering, and on-demand models to quickly make decisions backed by trusted data. 

The data future looks bright

The Tableau platform has evolved considerably during the 10-plus years that I’ve been with the company. I’m proud of how we’re empowering people to turn data into impact.

And we’re just getting started. Data transformation demands ongoing innovation. We continue to reimagine how companies work with data—and we’re innovating faster with Salesforce. Together, we’ll change the world with data.

Learn, connect, and engage at Tableau Live

I look forward to sharing our product vision more fully with you at Tableau Live. Join me and the Tableau team, along with customers who are making incredible strides with their data, at the virtual event. You can learn, connect, and engage with me and the world’s greatest data community. Expect to walk away inspired and energized with a deeper knowledge of how to put data to work for you.