Sessions

This session will tell the visual analytics journey of how Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s Tableau installation grew from a small group of 30 to an enterprise rollout of 30,000. We will take the attendees along a three-year journey as the team grew from Tableau in the hands of a few viz-starved consumers, to a full enterprise rollout. Along this journey, attendees will learn about the challenges and lessons learned while building a culture of analytics and growing our COE. They will also learn about the agile approach we deployed to jump to enterprise adoption. Oh, and see some incredible vizzes created along the way!

Today’s data teams are struggling with ever-increasing data volume from thousands of IOT and mobile devices all in real time. Your business can no longer wait days or weeks for the right data. Teams need to analyze and iterate within hours to stay competitive. But how do you capture data from so many devices in real time? How do you manage the infrastructure and rectify data errors? What about new data sources in the future? We’ll dive in on how to leverage the Alooma data platform to manage all your real-time data and perform advanced transformations and enrichments using real code, all on the fly.

Does your organization publish data visualizations on their website or company blog? Learn how the likes of tell their public-facing data stories using Tableau. In particular we will learn how to find data stories that your PR and social media teams will love, design beautiful vizzes optimized for public consumption, embed vizzes in your website, via Tableau Public, and ensure everything fits within your existing site content.

Crete Carrier Corporation is a national trucking company. After going to Tableau Conference last year, we realized that we have untapped potential to use geodata to improve our workflow. With Tableau beginning to introduce Microsoft SQL Spatial Data into the product lineup, there was no better time to start working on this. In this session we will walk you through our journey of spatial data implementation and share specific use cases. We'll discuss identifying available geodata, how to store that data in MSSQL for use in Tableau, and how to run various spatial queries to display in Tableau.

Creating equitable territories for your sales team is critical to having a productive, efficient, and happy sales team. Join this session to learn how Tableau’s own sales operations team uses Tableau for the creation of sales territories. Learn about the process, beginning with valuing postal codes, moving on to compiling those into balanced territories, and finally loading territories into our CRM platform. In particular, you'll learn how we leverage the power of Tableau’s geospatial functionality to interactively create custom territories.

Get an inside look at how Tableau runs their technical sales organization of over 300 people using Tableau products. A key to the sales efforts of any technology company is the technical subject matter experts that help a customer find the best solution to meet their needs. In software, this position is often referred to as pre-sales. At Tableau, we call this group customer consulting. Tracy Fagan, Tableau's VP of Customer Consulting, and his team, will share our strategy for how we use data to measure the health of our business and our products to stay on top of what matters every day. You will walk away from this session with new ideas on how to manage your team.

The volume and variety of data continues to increase dramatically as a medium-sized media company has transitioned from a primarily analog company to a digital one. However, the existing reporting tools left access to that data in the hands of very few people. Wanting to change this and knowing that there were budget restrictions, we deployed Tableau Online. Leveraging a phased approach, proved to be successful as the buzz around using data for decision-making has never been higher. Learn about our journey through the peaks and valleys of introducing Tableau Desktop and Online. Learn about practical things that worked and minefields to avoid when deploying Tableau.

Two years ago, Swinburne University embarked on a massive data and visualization-led journey of change. What was delivered empowered end users, created trust in data and reporting and shifted the very culture of the university. The implementation of the Swinburne-branded Tableau platform, DAPPER, transformed the use of data at Swinburne. The business analytics team combined technical change utilizing Tableau and business change to create a shift in perception of both the data team and strategic decision making at work. DAPPER and the change that was delivered aligns beautifully with the new Tableau (enterprise) licensing model, echoing the access and enablement of the same groups within business settings. Swinburne’s business analytics team has created a proven methodology around the new way of working, extending the traditional data and analytics service offerings to empower the business.

Would you like to know what kinds of design explorations and decisions went into building Tableau Prep? This session will explore the early ideas and prototypes that led to V1.

PEMCO Insurance is a true northwest company providing auto, home, and boat insurance to our neighbors since 1949. Consistently ranked highest in customer satisfaction, people are the heart of our business. Timely, actionable information helps us serve our customers better, so PEMCO is transitioning from centralized production reporting to distributed self-serve analytics using Tableau. But how do you do enable self-service while still ensuring quality? In this session, you will learn how the information management team at PEMCO: - Uses a multi-tier data delivery strategy to enable user constituencies of varying technical skill - Manages content promotion to ensure confidence - Measures content adoption and Tableau Server performance

Learn how and why to aggregate and pivot your data in Tableau Prep, some common pitfalls, and some useful functionality that make your life even easier.

One of the traditional defining principles of data visualization is that the data should drive the design. In fact, google "design-driven data" and, bar only a few exceptions, most results will still have those words in the order "data-driven design." In this session, learn how it’s possible to take an alternative look at data visualization by using real-world designs to create visualizations or data art pieces which remain true to the underlying data. The result is not just a chance to have fun and be creative, but in learning how to work with Tableau to create unusual and eye-catching visualizations, as well as developing a more creative eye, you may gain more technical skills along the way to take into future projects.

Tableau maps have come a long way since their inception. While the basic creation of maps has remained simple and intuitive, the sum of what can be achieved has grown rapidly. The best way to understand where a feature can go is to fully understand how it has developed. During this session, we'll take Tableau maps right back to the beginning, explore default and custom background maps, deep integration of Mapbox, bring custom spatial data into workbooks, and finally see how Tableau can form part of a larger mapping service stack. Interested in fully understanding this powerful Tableau feature? This session is for you!

The Marketing Analytics team at Tableau has been working on a large-scale marketing attribution analysis that involves building up our comprehensive customer journey data across many marketing channels, and attributing true effect of marketing to these channels. We use a combination of Markov Chain Model and traditional Media Mix Model to produce a simulation of how spend across channels impact leads and revenue. Along the way, we uncovered the power of visualization in making complex models accessible to end-users, and helping everyone “see” the model. In this session, you will not only see how Tableau as a marketer tackles one of the most challenging problems in marketing, but also see the power of using Tableau as a tool to bring down barriers to understanding sophisticated models.

Check out this session to learn more about parameters, when and why they are useful, and how to leverage them as a powerful tool in your analysis. You’ll witness how parameters are used in Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, and via the Tableau API. We will use parameters in common and uncommon analytics scenarios and address how they can be used to build interactive experiences in Tableau.

Unlike traditional printed reports, the Tableau Foundation's annual report is hosted in Tableau Public, which allows anyone to interact with the data and ask follow-up questions. The data even updates automatically every week—unheard of in the non-profit community! Join Tableau Foundation's Director Neal Myrick and Sr. Program Manager, Jason Suchumacher, as they explore how they built their annual report in Tableau. You’ll learn strategies for how organizations can move beyond the traditional annual report. Whether you're a non-profit, corporation, or foundation, you’ll walk away with new ideas and approaches for how your organization can share its latest information and cut the time and costs of producing a traditional printed piece.

When doing any analysis, whether it be financial, sales, workforce, or production, you inevitably need to make decisions on what factors are influencing your business. Many times that becomes an intuitive guessing game. What if you could use visual elements grounded in statistics and data science? You can, by employing the power of Dataiku and Tableau together to identify, predict, and act. In this session, we will demonstrate how Dataiku helps identify the drivers of key metrics in your key performance indicators (KPIs). We will then take our analysis further by isolating, predicting new data, and folding the values back into Tableau and our analysis.

In this session, attendees will see examples and real scenarios that will illustrate how developers can leverage Tableau’s open-source server monitoring utilities and combine them with intelligent, real-time analytics to monitor Tableau environments at scale. Attendees will get a firsthand preview of an entire analytics suite which showcases Tableau design and reporting best practices all while capturing information about Tableau usage, performance, concurrency and so much more. In addition to that, this session will show how this information can be turned into developer-facing solutions, providing otherwise unknown details on what’s happening in Tableau sites and projects and allowing them to transition and evolve with their users at speed.

With the explosion of sophisticated technology in the twentieth century and beyond, many female mathematicians, statisticians and data scientists are making essential contributions to human endeavors, from bioinformatics to spaceflight. We all know women who have shattered stereotypes, pursued their passions, and persisted even when things got tough. In this talk, I’ll share some of their stories and my own journey from college statistics professor to host of the PBS miniseries, “NOVA Wonders”. By bringing public awareness to the data-driven work we do, we can inspire the next generation and increase our Power in Numbers.

Why is the weather forecast always wrong? Are all shopping centres the same? Do bands always play the same set at gigs? How can we use data to answer these everyday questions you might debate with friends? That’s what two Zen Masters, Chris Love and Rob Radburn have been doing for the last six months. In this session, we’ll show you how we think-up questions, the tools we used to collect and wrangle data, and how we viz. And then show how we make sense of it all to provide an understanding of the data. Come along if you are looking for inspiration for your own Tableau projects, tips on getting agile and creative at work, or to see the world differently.

This talk describes how evolution has equipped every person with the essential skills for seeing and understanding data. The core Zen is a cycle of visual analysis that helps individuals and organizations work more effectively with data. You will learn what psychologists, statisticians and others have learned about using the human visual system to work effectively with data, the fundamental principles for designing effective dashboards, and how to expand the use of visual analysis in your organization.

Kick off your Tableau Conference experience by engaging with fellow banking, insurance, wealth management and capital markets enthusiasts. This informative, casual gathering aims to inspire conversations and connections among those across financial services.

Data and analytics are core to GoDaddy’s ability to meet the needs of its diverse global customer base of more than 17 million. Tableau Dashboards are used to analyze data for everything from improving products to optimizing sales and marketing campaigns. The sheer volume of data available, coupled with the complexity of GoDaddy's cloud + on-premise data architecture, and the diversity of GoDaddy employees leveraging data, makes it challenging to ensure that analysis is accurate and well governed.

Sharon Graves, BI tools evangelist and a member of the enterprise data team at GoDaddy, will show how GoDaddy leverages the Alation Data Catalog in conjunction with Tableau to guide analysis while fostering a self-service environment where everyone is encouraged to leverage data to make decisions.

Learn how data catalogs tame data complexity and ensure accurate analysis, including:

• Activating data governance rules through new capabilities like TrustCheck and endorsements which surfaces compliance recommendations directly in the workflow of Tableau users and power analysts
• Tagging & tracking sensitive PII data with catalog sets surfaced through a user-friendly search interface that points users to the most accurate & useful datasets
• Best practices for leveraging machine learning to create and maintain a business glossary, ensuring consistent metric definitions across data sources

Want to further explore your business intelligence data? OLAP databases like SQL Server Analysis Services and Oracle Essbase are likely the peas to your carrots. In this session, we’ll tackle efficient methods for maximizing the use of Tableau against cubes. (Note: this isn’t a deep-dive into OLAP cubes, and will focus on specific exercises in Tableau.)

Join us for the financial services Tableau user group at TC18. This is an opportunity for you to connect with other financial services users in the Tableau community. During this meeting, you'll have the chance to share best practices, connect with others, and learn new approaches to Tableau. We hope to see you there!

The road to data bliss and success is a well-worn path thanks to tools like Tableau, but it's also a path filled with common pitfalls that are important to know about and avoid. This session will show you practical examples of what not to do, and how to know when someone else has.

At Tableau, we believe that customer engagement helps us build better software. Come hear how User Research, Pre-Release Programs, Forums, Zen Masters, and other customer engagement programs bring the customer experience to life within our development organization. Hear from our customers about their experience and see how customer feedback impacts Tableau. Walk away with a better idea of how Tableau uses your input and a process framework you might deploy at your own organization!

Join Tableau Zen Master and MBA teacher and learn how to teach others to answer a business question using Tableau in just a two-day class. Expect a technique that mixes practice, theory and a data challenge. Learn ideal class structure, key Tableau concepts (and how they should be explained), and data visualization best practices.

Have you ever felt that you are not getting the full potential out of sets? Join this session to learn more about how sets can be used to answer powerful analytics questions and discuss their various strengths and limitations. Expect to explore many ways sets are used to support deep analysis in Tableau.

Product managers Jason Burns (from Tableau) and Tom Slee (from SAP) will jointly present best practices, and things you should know about using Tableau on top of SAP HANA for the best possible experience and performance.

Why sit alone during lunch when you could chow down with fellow data geeks supporting the consumer goods industry? Join members of Tableau's retail and consumer team at a reserved table in Data Village and connect with your peers.

Tableau helps people see and understand data. These seven words create a fundamental shift in an organization’s approach to data, and along with it, change. While organizations prepare technically for this, often times we forget to prepare our most important resource—people. In this session, we'll explore the reasons behind people’s natural resistance to change, and explore the mind-set of your workforce. We'll introduce methods for addressing this resistance through the use of champions, communities, success planning, and more! By the end of this session, you'll have a better understanding of how to bring your teams from resisting change to embracing change and the importance of investing not only in amazing technology but also in supporting your amazing people.

Last year at TC17, I outlined 10 basic steps, from data inception to decision point. Most of the feedback and questions I received were related to one step, “Communicate and Educate.” I realized that organizational change is a bigger issue that needs to be solved regardless of your level of planning, execution or delivery. While Tableau is Nationwide's current standard for data visualization, we have a lot of departments that are having a difficult time moving from standard reporting to visual analysis. I will share the three key areas we have utilized to drive organizational change successfully through most areas of the company: education, community and support.

This session will help you learn how to use customize API and PG scripts to manage server administration such as automate content administration, how to have two HOT HOT clusters which can help achieve 0% down-time, different ways to speed-up content migration between different clusters, on-demand cache management based on freshness of the data and much more.

Get ready to amp up your geographic data skills! This session spearheads mapping in Tableau. Learn the basic features of maps within Tableau, best practices, and visual customization features using your favorite movie data. We'll teach you the basics of mapping in Tableau Desktop, map latitude and longitude points, paths within your own data, and how to build multi-layered maps using dual axes, out-of-the-box map layers, and custom background images.

You’ve spent weeks foraging for, shaping, and analyzing the perfect data set and you’ve crafted your dashboards with care. What could possibly go wrong? Have you made unconscious design decisions that will turn off your audience before you even get started? What message is your audience hearing that you didn’t plan to send? This session will introduce you to three areas where your design choices might be telling your audience a different story than you’d planned.

To answer all the questions regarding movie performance from studios, Fandango has developed “Studio Portal” application, which is a collection of insights to be used by various departments within Fandango as well as External Studio. These dashboards give insights of how a movie is performing compared to other movies before and after release. We will walk you through our journey from inception to a finished product and its adoption.
You will learn about:

• Identifying the opportunity to build data products that solve for repetitive adhoc questions.
• Creating interactive and visually appealing dashboards.
• Packaging dashboards into a product that you can monetarize.
• How to inspire your customers to self-serve

Before the analysis of data even starts, reports show that 80% of your time is spent gathering, cleaning and preparing data. Why? Because data comes in a variety of files and sources, sizes, structures, and levels of quality. Wouldn’t you rather flip that statistic and spend your time performing the analysis and building great visual analytics and dashboards? If so, let us show you how we “mind the gap” and demonstrate how anyone can use Tableau Prep to reshape and refine data into usable data sets, allowing for analysis. During the session, we will reference common challenges our customers have when it comes to using data.

There are over 200 Not for Profit Organizations & Associations attending Tableau Conference this year. Join us for an opportunity to engage with fellow enthusiasts in the association world, share the impact your organizations have within your communities, and how data has played a part. Connect with industry colleagues to maximize your TC knowledge share and networking.

Join this session to get a peek into how Nest's centralized analytics function was conceived, structured, and scaled over the last 6 years. This session will touch on key learnings around technology, mindset, and approach -- all of which helped us "drive the business" in a rapidly expanding and evolving environment. Please come by in person, as this presentation will not be recorded!

Join this session to explore the scientific underpinnings of what enables people to understand data quickly and effectively (and how Tableau helps them get there). Gain the tips and tricks necessary for authoring content that your viewers will appreciate.

VizQL, the language at the heart of Tableau, ties together UI, queries, and a powerful mental model of data visualization. It allows users to build insightful vizzes and gives tools access to information for automated reasoning about the results. But that's just one example of languages that can allow for rich user input, optimizations, natural language interaction, and machine learning tools.

Providence Health is one of the largest healthcare systems in the US, challenged with delivering the highest quality of care enabling superior patient outcomes at the lowest cost.

In this presentation, Providence Health will present their Value Oriented Architecture (VOA) built with Tableau, to concurrently present and correlate the cost-of-care and meaningful clinical outcomes (“value”) using an apples-to-apples comparison across different providers. This enables a deep dive into the variances in outcomes and costs, and root causes thereof, to proactively address these and drive performance improvement. Learn how the physician-designers of the VOA partnered with clinicians across a 50 hospital system to create and deliver a Self-Service Visual Analytics platform for practice transparency and best practice discovery that is enabling superior performance and outcomes at a lower cost.

In this session, Netflix will share how Tableau is a core component of making data accessible to as many people as possible at the company. A large percentage of the company uses Tableau on a daily basis to discover insights and be more data informed. With this, our self-serve user base is rapidly growing.

In this session, we’ll share how we are using Tableau “out of the box” and also describe how it fits into our overall data environment. In addition, we’ll describe how we expect to use the Data Catalog and Object Model, our explorations of large-scale data stores, and challenges we are working on including governance and data lineage.

As the UK's second largest long-haul airline we have tons of interesting data ranging from the fares that passengers have paid for their seat to how many miniature bottles of gin we load onto our jumbo jets to Vegas!

Using Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and Alteryx we have transitioned from a web of Excel based reports to an efficient, centralized portal where analysts, managers and leadership alike can gain the answers they need, when they need them.

In this session we will give practical examples of how we’ve made a number of small changes to improve our adoption along with braving a live demo to show just how quickly our analysts can create production-ready reports.

Discover how to enhance collaboration between data scientists and business users. We will show how the integration between Tableau Server and R/Python will empower both types of users to complement each other’s skill sets and validate each other’s findings. Learn how to scale your deployment to larger audiences with best practices surrounding load balancing as well as performance optimization. We welcome both business users and data scientists to learn about the art of the possible when you combine advanced analytics with the Tableau experience you have come to expect in your enterprise.

Are you interested in your dashboards and vizzes providing even more insight through NLG? Come to this special networking opportunity to discuss the power of narratives and stories built right into your Tableau visualizations!

Do you have dashboards that take a painfully long time to load? Have you been told that Tableau can't handle large data sets or that you need to pre-aggregate your data in order for it to load quickly? At IBM Watson Health we deal with large data sets that can exceed 100 million rows and have learned some best practices and "tricks" to help dashboards load and perform without the need of pre-aggregating data (and losing key functionality). In this session we will share our real-world lessons learned in tuning Tableau workbook for optimal performance.

Financial services firm, Charles Schwab, provides a number of services to their investors and has an even greater number of data sources. Gessica and Branden will share a story of transformation through culture shift, supported by a robust Center of Excellence (COE). The presentation will show you how to enable better analysis through best practice evangelism, dashboard usability studies, and hosting entertaining events like the Schwab Iron Viz. You will also learn how regular software upgrades and partnering with Tableau enables self-service analytics on an galactic scale.

Data delivery is an essential factor in Premera’s mission to make healthcare work better.  Premera’s journey to "take data to the edge" was propelled over 5 years ago when Tableau Server was unleashed and made widely available to the analytic community, as an enterprise level analytics distribution platform. Tableau introduced a profound culture change at Premera and pivoted the way we deliver, define, and communicate information.  The hunger for data immediacy was realized very early on.  With the immediacy of information came concerns on data custody.  Tableau also brought to light a new way to communicate information.
In this presentation, we will share our lessons learned, how we overcame challenges and our future direction, showcased via Tableau solutions.