Tableau Conference is known for a lot of things, not the least of which are the fantastic sessions from Tableau customers and partners. This year featured some of our favorite sessions to date, including a delve into people insights at AbbVie as well as a Tableau Server workshop from one of InterWorks Europe’s brightest. You might be bummed that you missed them, but the good news is that they’re available to watch now! Even if you didn’t attend TC18, you can catch up by watching the videos below. Enjoy!

From Gimmicks and Critics, to Metrics and Analytics, the Story of AbbVie HR Insights

Lauren M. Misch, PhD
Manager, People Insights & Analytics
AbbVie

As a global biopharmaceutical company, AbbVie’s vision is to be recognized as a company that delivers a consistent stream of innovative medicines that solve serious health issues and have a remarkable impact on people’s lives. Achieving this requires an immensely talented team – a team of over 30,000 people around the world.

To better understand their team and keep improving their organization both internally and externally, AbbVie dove head first into the world of HR analytics. Using Tableau, they were able to tap into self-service analytics to uncover new insights and metrics. Guiding them on this journey was InterWorks.

To understand how AbbVie uses metrics gleaned from Tableau, it’s important to first under their talent philosophy, which is broken down into five main categories:

• Performance
• Behaviors
• Differentiation
• Accountability
• Transparency

By focusing on people insights in these areas, they hope to enable internal talent development, movement and retention while also creating the most excellent medicines to impact patients’ lives. To help them get a clearer picture of people insights, the first challenge was bringing together disparate data sources, mostly from their HR reporting platform, Workday. They wanted to give their business HR a one-stop shop to learn about the state of things and then take action. This would all happen in Tableau, and they wanted to go from 0 to 100 as soon as possible.

Working with InterWorks, they first developed a headcount report. They piloted it with the help of InterWorks, sharing videos to get people familiar with how the Tableau interface works. This basically blew everyone’s minds because they could rapidly find everything they wanted to know about their business group and then deliver it to their leadership concisely. As well as helping to design useful videos, InterWorks helped AbbVie create a Portal for Tableau that featured:

• Nested filters
• Interactive tooltips to save space for metric definitions
• Uncluttered sparklines
• Action filters that send users to drill-down pages
• Parameters for toggling between measures
• A security-protected list of employees

Working with Tableau and InterWorks to generate this has allowed AbbVie to facilitate the HR philosophy quickly and effectively. The portal enables different groups of people immediate access to information that’s relevant to them.

All That (Server) Jazz

David Pires
Senior Analytics Consultant
InterWorks

In this session, David Pires walked through the current ins and outs of Tableau Server. His three main objectives include:

1. Getting a better understanding of Tableau Server as a platform
2. Leaving the session with more questions than what you came with
3. Learning something you can take back to work or haven’t seen before

Before diving into Server specifically, David wanted to illustrate the differences between traditional BI and modern BI. He compared traditional BI to classical music, which is structured, rigid and not always conducive to creativity. Modern BI, on the other hand, is more like jazz in that it allows users to improvise and dig into their data in new and exciting ways. He emphasized that just because modern BI gives flexibility doesn’t mean that it’s the Wild West. You can provide the right kind of guidance to truly drive adoption like never before.

From there, David dove into how Tableau Server can enable organizations to implement modern BI practices. He explained that Tableau is a platform rather than a product, meaning it can extend across various parts of the broader analytics practice. This is evident with broad-reaching applications like Tableau Server, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, Tableau Online and more.

Diving into Server specifically, David shared how Server is available both on-premise and in the cloud. He went on to share how dynamic the update cycle was, with three of his favorite features coming out in the last 18 months alone. These three features are Tableau Serve for Linux, the Hyper data extract engine and Tableau Services Manager. After that, he dove into all the different Server processes and their functions. He then broke down Tableau Server competencies in four key areas:

1. Performance
2. Monitoring
3. Scalability
4. Maintenance

David rounded out the session with a brief overview of different pricing models and the advantages to each as well as considerable time for questions.

Check Out More Sessions!

Looking for more TC18 sessions to watch? You can catch most of them on Tableau’s TC18 YouTube playlist. It’s worth noting that not all sessions were recorded. Our own Mat Hughes and Brian Bickell hosted a session about transitioning Tableau to the cloud that we’ll aim to share soon. The good news is that there are plenty of fantastic sessions to keep you busy in the meantime. Until then, happy viewing!