Our client, one of the world’s largest multinational technology companies, has a large and complex Tableau environment with many users who frequently analyze data for business insights. Often, they would notice inconsistencies or irregularities in the data. To manage this, they would need to identify the data warehouse to go through the incorrect data and make updates to ensure that accurate data appears in all relevant dashboards. This requires time and manual efforts to check with all the teams.

To reduce time to insight, our client wanted to enable their Tableau users to write back to the data source, annotate the data and update the data points directly from the Tableau dashboard. In addition to this, they also wanted to promote the adoption of Tableau-based collaboration across the company, while offering enterprise-grade security, access management, resource separation and integration with their existing infrastructure.

The primary goal was to reduce delays in addressing data issues by allowing users to annotate, comment on and write back data directly from within Tableau dashboards. The client aimed to simplify collaboration across teams while ensuring enterprise-level access controls, security and integration with their existing systems.

We implemented Elements for Tableau to deliver enterprise-grade write back capabilities and seamless dashboard collaboration. As a flexible Tableau dashboard extension that can be configured and customized to meet specific needs of the most demanding enterprises, Elements integrated directly with the client’s existing directory service and network infrastructure to offer a complete write-back solution hosted on-prem. Additionally, there was a need to optimize Elements to the client’s use case to avoid fragmenting relevant datasets into silos for each team. To solve this, we created a central database for all annotations across the various teams. This enabled more streamlined cooperation while maintaining the required enterprise-grade access and permission controls.

Highlights:

The client realized an immediate improvement in the time it took to resolve data accuracy questions and change data points in Tableau. Another notable result was that conversations about data insights, both within and between teams, increased overall and took place directly on the dashboards. Usage of Elements for Tableau scaled up 500% in the second half of the year of adoption compared to its initial deployment, onboarding a total of nine organizations across the company. During the same period, usage of Tableau inside the company increased by 34%, as Elements helped Tableau become an integral part of the decision-making process. With Elements, collaboration happens directly in Tableau, driving the design of new dashboards that generate faster insights and more engaging experiences.

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