Channel
Data
The BI Cantos: Establishing a Governance Framework
In the last post, I provided guidelines on security and preventing unauthorized access to your data. I warned you that an overly restrictive security model could encourage bad behavior. BI system security is like my wife's purse. I might want to look inside, but I wouldn't...
The BI Cantos: Understanding Security Considerations
Security and data governance are often treated as the same thing. They aren't. Security is about preventing unauthorized access. Governance is making it easier for people to find the information they need. One is about prevention, and the other is about inclusion. IT staff are rarely...
The BI Cantos: Training Your Team
If you skimp on training, you may burn every penny you save later in the project when it's inconvenient and more costly. Even your expert team members need training and time to become confident in their skills and knowledge of new tools and methods. Your core...
How To Use Tableau Repository to Monitor Your Tableau Server
Looking to optimize your Tableau Server? If you are reading this, you are most probably on the right path. But how do you know where to start? Just like our health, before any treatment can be prescribed, a diagnosis is required. When it comes to...
The BI Cantos: Releasing Your First Dashboards
Most people in your company are not database experts. They are interested in something other than databases and ELT programs. They want information that supports their work needs. Human beings are visual creatures, and interactive dashboards are visual data expressions. Dashboards enable everyone to see, understand...
The BI Cantos: Planning a Proof-of-Concept Sprint
The plans, quotes and project deliverables your selected consulting partner helped you develop should include a proof-of-concept project recommendation based on your combined due diligence. The proof-of-concept (POC) sprint is a crucial subproject that tests your platform and software selections. The first dashboards your end users...
The BI Cantos: Building Data Workflows and Best-of-Breed Solutions
Data workflows are like hiking boots — good-fitting ones can take you anywhere. Ill-fitting ones spawn misery. As you document the existing workflows in discovery meetings, these details will influence your software selections — the tools for the data workflows. The amount and type of work...
User-Centered Dashboard Development: Maintain
If you’re new to User-Centered Dashboard Development (UCDD), please check out the earlier posts in this series (also found at the bottom of this post) to get acclimated, then come back here! We’re almost to the end of our UCDD Framework and today will cover phase...
The BI Cantos: Conducting Discovery Sessions
An essential part of any business intelligence system plan is to collect information on the vital data workflows within your company. An ounce of discovery is worth a pound of remediation. -Adapted from Benjamin Franklin During discovery, identify the business processes that comprise operations and provide data outputs....
A Tableau Style Guide Made in Tableau
One of the reasons I gravitated towards a career in data visualization was just that — the visualizations. My background is in the visual arts and to see data, facts and numbers, concepts and correlations, all brilliantly designed and represented in colorful graphs activated both...
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for Tableau
As data grows more and more entrenched into everyday business decisions, the importance of questioning our data and how we interpret it becomes vital. At InterWorks, we work with all different types of data, organizations and decisions. We know the impact that data can have,...
Challenges of NLP and Solutions with Dataiku
In the previous post (that you can read here), we started doing some analysis on airline reviews. We did very basic data preparation, used the Dataiku Sentiment Analysis plugin and evaluated the model with the help of a confusion matrix. In this blogpost, we will...
The BI Cantos: Developing a Strategic Roadmap
A strategy vision roadmap (SVR) is a document that details the purpose of the project, expected benefits, training plans, project timeframe, proof-of-concept testing and validation. The SVR summarizes the overall project plan while also time-phasing all significant sub-projects (sprints) necessary to complete all the deliverables....
The BI Cantos: Initial Deployment Considerations
In this post, I'll cover team composition, focusing on technical and operational staff that will form the core of your team. The need for more detailed information about your business drives the desire to deploy a BI system. Typical goals include achieving better reporting, more detailed...
No Closed Doors: Making Dataviz Accessible for All
One thing I noticed: there's one last step that I always take before heading out into the street with two overflowing grocery bags. Just before the exit, I push the handicap door opener on my right. And it stays open long enough for me and...
Title Case Formatting in Tableau with the PROPER() Function
Exciting news for Tableau users! With version 2022.4, Tableau has introduced the highly anticipated PROPER() function. This function makes it easy to transform string data into title case format, where the first letter of each word is capitalized, and all other letters are in lowercase. It...
The BI Cantos: Introduction
This blog post series aims to provide the unfamiliar leader or participant with a view of what is required to successfully deploy a business intelligence (BI) system to ensure success. Deploying a BI system is challenging. Why would you want to undertake a project to...
User-Centered Dashboard Development: Launch
If you’re new to User-Centered Dashboard Development (UCDD), please check out the earlier posts (also found at the bottom of this post) to get acclimated, then come back here! Above: "Three… Two… One… Blast off!" The time is here to launch our dashboard to our end...
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Support (In-Place Upgrade from 18.04 guide)
Tableau have now launched support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS just in time for 18.04 coming to the end of hardware and update support on April 30, 2023. Extended Security Maintenance will last into 2026, however the desire to move to a supported operating system will...
