Tableau Prep: Up & Running

Chapter 1. Why Self-Service Data Prep?

With every organization swimming in data lakes, repositories, and warehouses, never before have their employees had such an enormous opportunity to answer their questions with information rather than just their experience and gut instinct.

This isn’t that different from where organizations stood a decade ago, or even longer. What is different is who wants access to that data to answer their questions. No longer is the expectation that a separate function of the business will be responsible for getting that data; now, everyone feels they should have access to it. So what has changed? Self-service data visualization. What is about to change to take this to the next level? Self-service data preparation.

A Short History of Self-Service Data Visualization

More than a decade ago, all things data related were the domain of specialist teams. Data projects went to either Business Intelligence (BI) teams or Information Technology (IT) teams, who set up data infrastructure projects to produce reports. This was an expensive and time-consuming process that often resulted in products that were less than ideal for all concerned.

The reason this methodology doesn’t work is the iterative nature of BI. Humans are fundamentally intelligent creatures who like to explore a question, learn, and then ask more questions as they become more intrigued. Humans are also great at spotting visual patterns and charting data sets to help find those patterns. With the traditional ...