Hammer Boys and Custom Visualizations
Your company spent millions of dollars on several Data Visualization products. To support and develop these tools, an army of BI developers were quickly hired. All over the company hammers met nails everywhere the word visualization was uttered.
All was well.
One day after hours of plunging square pegs into round holes, you raised your head and suggested building a custom viz. All of a sudden the fluorescent lights flickered with an eerie buzz worthy of a 1980’s horror flick. Each time the lights flickered, you saw the true face of your BI colleagues: hammers for heads.
All kidding aside, I used to be a Hammer Boy. Solving every data delivery problem with MicroStrategy. Things that should have been done in ETL, things you should never do in a BI tool, and things that makes maintenance and updates impossible. I was a MicroStrategy expert, knew it inside out, and I used it beyond its capabilities.
The data visualization (BI) product du jour is Tableau. While it’s more capable than legacy solutions, the Hammer Boy mentality is even stronger with Tableau teams. You won’t be able to get through a custom viz conversation without someone saying Tableau can do it. Of course it can do it — that is if you change the requirements, reduce the data volume, buy more licenses, and abandon any sense of UX/UI.
If you’re reading this, you most certainly have seen Tableau workbooks with nested calculated fields buried in parameters hidden inside LOD’s. You know it took them a long time to develop those hacks, and its going to take you even longer to unwrap the logic. Like you, I also love using Tableau and it is the right tool 7 out of 10 times. However, it is not the right tool for every visualization.
Persuading your Team
Invariably someone will make the argument of “why custom viz when we have Tableau?” It is a legit question especially when the idea of a custom viz is new to the org. The frame, however, is all wrong. Its our old Hammer Boy frame. We all need to start with the requirements and let it dictate the information design. It is equally fair to ask the question “why Tableau?” Maybe we don’t care about usability (UX), scalability, or costs in this instance. Remember 7 out of 10 times Tableau is the right way to go. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t give our goto Viz tool a pass when we have great alternatives.
The new frame is “what is the best way to deliver this insight?” From here you look at time to market, costs, and speed vs quality.
I’ve built hundreds of dashboards in MicroStrategy and Tableau. Its always an exercise in constraint imposed by the platform.
Forget that!
Remind you’re team that you‘ re the expert when it comes to building visualizations. Boldly lead and they will follow.
