Tableau vs the chart-builders

Why I refuse to name the chart-builders.

Yes, you are right. This is one about the competition. But is it actually competition? Or shall I refer to them as chart-builders?

Sure, I am totally biased, no doubt about that. I co-manage a European Tableau Gold Partner active in multiple regions, engaging with over 180 clients, selling the Tableau dream the past four years. However, I have been in the Business Intelligence space for almost 15 years and have some ideas and thoughts about this. I'll leave it up to you if you would categorize this as thought leadership ;-)

I refuse to name the chart-builders. When I was first considering writing this article, I quickly glanced over the analytics market and the popular Gartner magic quadrant. I decided to download various vendors trial versions and boiled my analyses down to 3 questions:

• Is this vendors mission statement similar to Tableau?
• What are they doing that is vastly differentiating them from Tableau?
• Is there a: "Hey, that is really cool" feeling from using this solution?

My answers ranged from maybe, to meh, to nope and a big NOPE.

Let's step a few years back.

Jumping back to 1998, having actually made my first report on a Siemens BS2000 terminal writing Cobol code. I was quite satisfied when my first list print-out with values rolled out of this matrix printer after a few days of coding. And my teacher simply went: "Nice job, now put little stars around your table edging the paper. Have fun", laughing while he walked away. It was a pain to code and I hated it but I understood the value of presenting something in a better way once I finished.

I gradually moved on to building interactive reports with MS Access, coding interactive date range filters with nice charts. I built my first Business Objects and MicroStrategy reports forcing my chart choices upon the end-user, a thing we named guided analytics today. When I gradually moved into selling BI solutions, I was still doing the same stuff.

As I thought back, it hit me. I have been a chart-builder for a big part of my professional life. I ended up selling people fancier ways to... build charts. Did I actually listen to the real analytical value of their questions? Not always, most of the time I used to demo the software, load the data and then look at the graph I think is pretty and start dragging data onto it.

Every creative thought process is cut off by forcing us to first decide what chart would best represent our conclusion, regardless of the chart-builder we use. By forcing ourselves to spend more time on the chart-selection process, we lose a lot of creativity in actually answering questions from data.

As I said, the experience felt very meh.

But Geoffrey, we're in 2018. Things have changed!

Look at any leader in the Gartner segment other than Tableau and you will understand the chart-builders still follow that same 30-year old chart-building principle. I'll line them up below:

1. Load the data, prep the data and calculations.
2. Build a pivot table, change the table to a chart. Next.
3. Select a chart first, drag some fields on the chart. Next.
4. Ugly graph? Google for any other chart, add the chart. Drag some fields on the chart. Next.
5. Whoops, this chart is not showing what I want. Back to data prep and calculation building. Next.
6. Repeat process. Finish prototype dashboard. Next.
7. Does this answer my questions? Repeat with other charts.

It's a mind-numbing boring process where you will you be mainly focussed on building charts and forget to answer your initial questions.

Of course, I'm not telling you that these vendors will not help you find the insight you're looking for. There is some great software out there that is capable of building great ...well... charts and dashboards.

Have you really started your thought process from the question you would like to see answered? Have you really used these vendors tools, finding insights as you go without being thrown back to a chart selection process?

Probably your answer is nope.

Answer questions at the speed of thought.

Our mind has roughly about 70.000 individual thoughts per day. Why would we stop our creativity by not allowing ourselves to answer questions at the speed of thought?

When I first opened up Tableau, it took me a few minutes to understand what they did differently. It blew my mind. I was answering questions on the go and just kept on building, directly connected to data sources without the help of any IT or data specialist.

Shortly after my aha moment, as described above, I decided to stop selling anything other than Tableau. I wrote a business plan back in 2014, Biztory was born.

Tableau helps people see and understand their data. It doesn't stop your creativity at any point, it is intuitive and built for digging deeper into your data and finding insights thanks to harnessing the power of visual analytics. It will not stop your thought process of forcing you to think about the right chart, it will guide you towards the right chart as you are answering questions about your data. This feeling of getting actionable insights is what I love to describe as being in the data flow.

This is why I claim the title as my personal truth. In 2018, it's still Tableau vs the chart-builders. I have yet to see another vendor changing the way I work with data.

Sadly, from a marketing perspective, the chart-builders all compare themselves to Tableau and it has become more challenging to help people understand in a simple demo how it is completely different from anything they have used before.

That being said, I'm always up for a challenge, if you want to understand the claims above, team Biztory is always happy to jump on a call and do a deep dive in the world of Tableau.