[monkeydust]

I was an early Tableau adopter and promoter in my org many years back.

At the time the incumbent, Qliksense, was lagging badly and there was genuine grass roots support for Tableau as our next gen BI tool. Adoption grew significantly and people were happy...for a while. I remember reaching out the founder/CEO at the time and getting responses back. It was great.

Fast forward today and its different, over time Tableau dissatisfaction grew, I think a lot of it was the fact that our use-cases got more advanced and performance dropped and not being able to understand the complex SQL it was generating didn't help. Also Qliksense got noticeably better UX and importantly was cheaper. Today, MS PowerBI which came from left field, is really the front runner for us.

Parking this situation for a second I think the real issue is that people are getting a bit overwhelmed with dashboards. I have access to near 100 across the three platforms, they more or less do the same thing and are thus somewhat commoditized, I don't feel passionate about any of them as I did back in the day with Tableau. Worse, I have to spend mental bandwidth figuring out which one I need to open to answer my query, then I have to spend time navigating the UX to get my answer so I can move on with the task in hand.

We don't necessary need more dashboards, just faster ways to go from question to reliable answer where information can be pushed rather than pulled, especially if data points start looking anomalous over time.

Note - If your a startup in this field looking to upend the BI space reach out, I have spent a lot of time in this space over the years.

[c-linkage]

Speaking of too many dashboards, my opinion at this point is that Tableau is where data goes to die. I have so many dashboards that are created in my organization but each dashboard gets one or less views per month. No one ever looks at these dashboards that get created.

My feeling is that these dashboards were probably more like one-time reports that someone decided to automate. But there's definitely a sense of Tableau fatigue. And I don't know if switching to a different technology like Power BI will make that any better.

[alexpetralia]

Do most data-driven decisions need to be made daily?

Sometimes you just need to see the data once or month or once a quarter to make a decision. Sometimes, you just need to see the data once! (an ad hoc analysis in Excel)

We should think of the rate at which we need to act on decisions, and it need not always be a frenetic "now, now, now"

[data-ottawa]

Dashboards have a very long tail depending on use case.

You've got daily driver exec and performance dashboards, then you have over time trend dashboards, and finally you have drill down self serve explore of data export tools. Alerting should be separate.

It's expected that most dashboards will not be checked often, trends don't change daily so it's usually not meaningful to look at most metrics daily. Self serve tools are only needed occasionally, but exist as a cost savings on data teams doing low effort high time tasks.

Dashboard tools and spreadsheets are the only good tools for sharing data, I find most reports and spreadsheets are actually just one offs.

[monkeydust]

100% same experience at my place.

I go back to thinking about how the data can be pushed rather than pulled. Whilst BI tools have some solutions I never found anything great so ended up with homebrew scripts. Definitely an opportunity space.

[hughess]

I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!