IT’s Perspective on Tableau
Doug Rausch, Mercer, Manager of CRM & BMI Product Teams: As an IT group we're much more
agile. Charles Boicey, UC Irvine Medical Center,
Informatics Solutions Architect: From an IT perspective we've put the -- we can put the
tool where it belongs, in the hands of the folks that use the data and know the data.
Paul Lilford, UnitedHealthcare, Director of EPM and BI: It's one of the most impressive
ROI messages I think you can find with any software. And since we own everything, we
have a lot of comparison points of, you know, what's good ROI or not.
Easy to implement
Doug: Tableau is simple to deploy. That’s a huge benefit.
Paul: The beauty of it is it's not that complicated. Their server-side interface is as easy as
their desktop interface. Charles: So, Tableau as far as an implementation
perspective, it's -- it's really from an IT perspective it's -- it's training only. I
mean, what do you have to do? You have to, you know, download something on a -- a desktop,
click an icon, put in a -- a key, and you're done; that's your implementation.
Doug: We have other products in-house that take a team of people to understand the nuances,
get it installed, upgrade it, and migrate content. With Tableau it's really been so
easy to use, it's been so easy to upgrade. And so it's such -- it's such a -- a lower
cost of ownership for us. Charles: We can do an upgrade in about 10
minutes, and there are very few applications out there that you can say that about. So,
I mean, as far as maintenance there really is no maintenance.
Paul: I spend less than an hour a month maintaining the environment that supports 1400 users.
I have no help desk calls on it. The only call I get is "I want another license.”
Provide self-service business intelligence
Paul: I like the fact that it empowers the business user to do business analytics.
Charles: The folks that collect the data, that know the data, that own the data, are
then developing their own visualizations, their own reports, outside of the space of
the IT department. Doug: Our analysts can pick it up within a
couple hours. Our end users can pick it up within 10 or 15 minutes.
Paul: The biggest thing Tableau did for us was it changed the paradigm that people had
with looking at business intelligence and how you get to quick analytics. It took them
away from thinking about how you accomplish it and focused them on looking at the business
question to get them there. Charles: You know, you can't -- you can't
lose here. This is a -- this is a win-win for everybody. I look better and our team
looks better. IT is, you know, becomes superstars.