Introducing Tableau and the Motivation for Building a Dashboard

8Percent has used Tableau as its BI tool for 3 years, and recently built an office TV dashboard. Simply delivering statistics via Slackbot allowed sharing of same-day figures, but had limitations in showing changes over time at a glance.

Tableau is introduced as a tool that pulls in data scattered across various places and visualizes it effectively. Its composition is broadly as follows.

• Tableau Desktop: The core tool for visualizing data
• Prep Builder: A preprocessing tool that processes and combines scattered data to create ledger data
• Tableau Server: A server that stores files created in Desktop and Prep Builder, serves them via the web, and regenerates them on a schedule
• Tableau Online: The SaaS form of Tableau Server

The reason a TV dashboard was needed was that simply putting information up on the web wasn't enough. A web dashboard is good for visualization, but it cannot push information, and had the limitation that visitors had to come in on their own. In contrast, displaying a screen in the office allows everyone to share key metrics at the same time.

Initially, Tableau Desktop files were shared, and later distribution moved to Tableau Online and a Confluence plugin, but limitations emerged.

• As data grew larger, loading speed slowed down, with some cases taking over 30 seconds to check.
• Since the server was located in the US, round-trip data latency occurred.
• After switching to an internal network, database access issues arose, requiring a workaround via Tableau Bridge.
• Sensitive internal data, such as customer transaction history, was difficult to send externally for analysis.
• Prep Conductor and the 100GB capacity limit also became burdens.

Ultimately, it was determined that securing the necessary performance, data control, and operational flexibility required directly installing and managing Tableau Server. The next post will cover the process of installing Tableau Server.