This is the last post in our series for data scientist wannabes. In it, we describe how business users can distribute and share data analytics results in dashboards.
Share Data with Customized Dashboards
Dashboards have been around for a while. In fact, they’ve become a standard part of high-end visual data analytics tools, where the emphasis is on easy setup and a wide range of visualizations for different users.
Easy to set up, use and share
Tableau software is best known as a visualization tool that makes it easy to look at data, slice it up and look at it again in different ways. Tableau Desktop uses dashboard software that enables business users to create interactive, real-time dashboards in minutes.
You can share Tableau dashboards on Tableau Server or Tableau Online in wikis, corporate portals, mobile devices or any web page. The software’s built-in visual best practices and dozens of templates ensure your dashboard communicates effectively to your target audience.
Customized dashboards provide specialized insight
Tableau Desktop offers customized dashboards for one-time investigations or ongoing reports.
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- Executive dashboards offer quick, reliable indicators of how an organization is doing and can alert execs to potential problems before they becomes an emergency. These dashboards provide different displays for profitability, products and customers. Each visualization becomes an interactive, tabbed application. Each app offers deeper layers of information, with which users can identify specific problems and opportunities in minutes.
- Operational dashboards. These displays are designed to provide ops managers with the status of their production, machine utilization, web traffic, or other critical systems. They combine multiple data sources to help monitor sensor data, operator inputs, and real-time systems all in one dashboard. This is where dashboards become interactive applications, a window into data presented on computer screens, web pages or mobile devices.The key lies in speedy results. Business users can now create or update a dashboard quickly and easily and reduce response times from days or weeks to minutes.
And Now, a Word to Hadoop Data Analysts…
Does your organization use open-source tools on Big Data? If so, you don’t have to sacrifice quality reporting for raw processing power. In fact, if your organization uses Hadoop from Hortonworks, you now have an express route to powerful visual communications of your results.
Customized, Easy-to-Share Dashboards via Hadoop-Tableau Server integration
Tableau does more than provide powerful visualizations of analytics results. It also connects directly to Hortonworks and other Hadoop distributions. So, whatever data you have and how much of it you analyze, business users in your organization can find and share insights buried in your Hadoop deployment.
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- Direct connection to easy data sharing. Tableau software with Hadoop now enables you to treat Hadoop as any other data connection.The direct connection makes it easy to create and change dashboards for one-time analysis or periodic reports.
- Speedy processing, many formats. Many other tools are built on the tradition of generating reports offline. But Tableau offers fast processing speeds (Tableau Server relies on Hive to structure queries and then cache information in memory) to make dashboards interactive. And dozens of templates make it easy to create, customize and change dashboards online.
So, there you are. We’ve gone through data exploration, analysis, visualization and reporting—the entire data analytics process.
We hope that you now have enough information to encourage you to become a power user of data analytics software. Experience tells us that wrangling analytics know-how and bringing it into your workgroup or department will provide many benefits, including greater productivity and deeper understanding of what’s happening in your organization.
Dennis Aligno
Principal Consultant
About Dennis: Dennis has skills and expertise in Spotfire installations & implementations (servers such as Spotfire, Webplayer, ADS/Composite). He has extensive experience with working closely with clients to find and execute optimal solutions. His past experience includes Vice President of Information Security at Bank of America, as well as positions in application development, databases and mobile development.
