Tableau

Tableau provides unsophisticated, non-technical users with the ability to create high-fidelity, visual/graphical representations of their data.

In my career as an IT executive, and having worked on multiple enterprise Business Intelligence programs for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, Tableau was the bane of my existence and in every company where Tableau was implemented by business, I found myself in Tableau hell. While Tableau does enable unsophisticated users with the ability to create stunning visual representations of data, Tableau goes against the very challenges that Business Intelligence programs and Information Management have been diligently trying to solve. At the end of the day, Tableau is like a virus across the organization; there is no single version of the truth, the data and KPI's in the reports are stove-piped and the context of the data is not understood by those creating and using the reports.

With great power comes great responsibility and my experience with Tableau has been a proverbial thorn in my side and considerable time, money and resources was invested by the companies I worked for trying to reconcile the Tableau reports produced by end-users against the gold-standard reports being produced by Enterprise Business Intelligence platforms, and mission-critical business decisions were negatively affected by inaccurate data on Tableau reports and significant monies were wasted replacing/automating the Tableau reports with accurate, enterprise reports, dashboards and real Business Intelligence solutions. Not a fan of Tableau, not then, not now, not ever.