The Disconnect behind Tableau Pulse
The role of BI within the business is changing. A new AI feature from Tableau delivers a new way to track KPIs and visualise marketing performance.
One of the most misunderstood roles in marketing is that of the data analyst. The popular perception is that BI is mostly about creating attractive graphs in one of the leading data visualisation tools. While data presentation is indeed a core skill for any data analyst, it only forms a small part of the role. The day-to-day language of a data analyst is based around extracting, transforming and loading data rather than discussing the merits of pie charts versus bar charts. After all, few things annoy a CMO more than seeing inconsistent or inaccurate reporting.
The bulk of a data analyst's time is spent in back-end data manipulation, building the unified data models needed to power the charts that everyone sees. These data models take the disparate datasets that exist across the organisation and transform them into a set of metrics and KPIs that can be filtered and drilled into using whatever attributes make sense to the business. Many of the leading BI tools even have separate applications for building the back-end data model as compared to the front-end dashboard. This allows one data model to be shared across multiple dashboards, ensuring that key reporting metrics are tracked consistently across the entire enterprise.