Tableau and business intelligence putting an end to email fraud
Tableau’s mission is to help people and businesses to see and understand the world's data. For any business there's that much data out there and managers need to see and understand it. What Tableau see happening today in the industry is an acceleration towards more data everywhere. If you think about any given company, they have so much more data than they had 20 years ago, even things like CRM systems.
Before, your business had a bunch of sales people with their notes about who they called and their own agenda books and so on. Now you can get your data out of Salesforce and Microsoft CRM and a bunch of other systems. And you can actually do analytics on how many times you call your customers, which ones are converting out of different industries, which ones aren't converting, which sales people are doing well, which salespeople aren't...there's just a variety of numbers that didn't exist before.
That proliferation of data makes visualization even more important because if our brains couldn't comprehend five pages of rows and numbers before, there's no way we're going to comprehend thousands of pages of rows and numbers, which is effectively what a lot of companies have.
And how is Tableau Helping?
Tableau can connect to any kind of data that's structured, and almost all data—even structured data-- is dirty, so that’s something we deal with all the time. Then with dirty data we have tools that let you clean up your data inside the tool by excluding values that are obviously false or recoding things that are mis-coded...it all depends on the data, but there are ways to deal with it at different levels.
But with unstructured data we see customers do different things. Sometimes they do some analysis beforehand. For instance, there is a client, who does a lot of fraud analysis with email - they're trying to find patterns in email - that might lead to some fraudulent activity. They do that for their clients, and they take a lot of that data and create some structure around it through word searches and incidents and then they analyse that in Tableau. Those are the kinds of things you can start to do with interactive visualization, and then you get into really powerful ways to use your data. So that's the high level theory of visualization.
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