In present times, we are dealing with quintillion bytes of data every day. While collecting and analyzing such huge amounts of data is challenging for every company, visualizing them to gain better insights is another concern. Thanks to powerful tools like Tableau, data visualization has become quite convenient. After the raw data is transformed into a usable format, it is analyzed so as to unearth hidden trends and correlations. When these trends and insights are represented in the form of interactive charts or graphs (visualized), the stakeholders and business leaders get a better picture of them and next use them to make more informed decisions.
When you head over to the official website of Tableau, it is described as a visual analytics platform that transforms the way people use data to solve business problems. It is the market-leading choice for modern business analysis, making it easier for businesses to explore and manage data, and uncover and share insights faster that have the potential to change the businesses. Chris Stolte, Cristian Chatbot, and Pat Hanrahan are the co-founders of Tableau. Since its inception in 2003, the tool has witnessed impressive growth, so much that it was acquired by Salesforce (the world’s Number 1 CRM platform) in 2019.
Tableau’s applications go beyond just data visualization, it is effectively used in business analysis as well. This article discusses how you can leverage the power of Tableau for business analysis.
How is Tableau Used in Business Analysis?
Tableau is a powerful business intelligence tool that supports the full cycle of service analytics from prep to analysis and sharing, along with data management and governance. Tableau basically offers these products – Tableau Prep, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Online and Tableau Server, and Tableau Mobile. As you can infer, Tableau can be accessed everywhere, you can download it on a local memory and use it on-premise, you can use the tool online on a laptop, or even access it on your smartphone.
Talking about business analysis, it is a discipline that focuses on finding the business needs and identifying the solutions to various business problems. Such a solution must bring improvement and may relate to bringing any organizational change, policy development, strategic planning, changing a business process, or developing new software. Business analysis is performed by organizations to define and validate solutions that align with business needs, objectives, and goals. According to IIBA (the International Institute of Business Analysis), business analysis helps in determining and articulating the need for change in how organizations work, and to facilitate that change.
Now how is Tableau related to business analysis? Well, a business analyst needs to make different types of reports based on the business requirements. This is where Tableau can help, it is a powerful Business Intelligence tool that is effective in creating interactive dashboards and reports. With the help data visualization through Tableau, business analysts can uncover meaningful trends from the analyzed data and arrive at probable solutions. Further, it becomes easier to point out areas of opportunities and concern and complement the business analysis process.
Tableau Desktop is a powerful data discovery and exploration application that helps business analysts answer important questions in seconds. Its drag and drop interface for visualizing data, different views, and combining multiple databases with ease are some of the top features that can be used by business analysts to build interactive visuals. The tool has an intuitive interface through which the user can stay in the flow of analysis while unearthing deep insights that produce measurable business impact.
Business analysts come across a variety of requests for information on a day-to-day basis, be it from colleagues, managers, or stakeholders. Usually, at the start of the analytics process, such requests are not organized in a way that makes them easy to fulfill. To accomplish the original purpose of data request, business analysts take time to understand the request, organize the information in a manner that makes sense and identify the data, decide the type of analysis based on the question at hand, and come up with the format of the final output – whether it needs to be a single chart, graph, or a dashboard.
For the above process, business analysts can use Tableau Blueprint Planner. It is something that contains questions to be answered befire deploying Tableau broadly. The answers that business analysts give will inform activities at every stage and workstream in the Tableau Blueprint. Some of the important areas covered in the planner are analytics strategy, data and analytics survey, Tableau Users, data and content governance, use cases and data sources, education role mapping, upgrade planning and checklist. These sections of the Tableau Blueprint Planner can be revisited when business analysts receive new information requests from various departments or teams.
Bottom Line
The knowledge of Tableau is quite useful for business analysts. Whether one is looking to deploy an analytics solution that is entirely hosted, on-premise, or in the cloud platform like Azure, GCP, or AWS, Tableau can be used effectively to share the business insights. So, are you ready to learn Tableau and make the most of it in your business analysis career?
