Managing the data prep chaos in your organization

With self-service analysis the new norm for data-driven organizations, many people will do what prep they can with the available tools and capabilities to make the data work for them—whether it’s cutting and pasting or writing huge calculations that aren’t optimal for the server. Even analysts report that the majority of their job is not analysis, but actually cleaning and reshaping data—with an ETL process, in self-service data prep tools, or even in spreadsheet tools like Excel.

Data preparation has historically been an IT function, but the data landscape has evolved. Self-service data preparation tools put the power in hands of the people who know the data the best while reducing the burden on IT to prepare it. But self-service data prep is still a brand new skill set; it needs to be developed and rolled out to enable users to understand and perform prep functions effectively, establish repeatable processes, automate them for efficiency, and ultimately build trust and confidence in the data for wider use.

What Tableau did for visual analysis, we are now doing for data preparation. With Tableau Prep Builder, released in the spring of 2018, data is even more accessible with visual, smart, and direct data prep. Now meet Tableau Prep Conductor—schedule your Tableau Prep Builder flows to run in a centralized, scalable, and reliable server environment so your data is always up to date. It also gives administrators visibility into self-service data preparation across their organization. With Tableau Prep Conductor, you can manage, monitor, and secure flows using your Tableau server environment. Tableau Prep Conductor is integrated to Tableau Server and Tableau Online, leveraging existing scheduling, tracking, and security functionality.

This paper is intended for IT professionals and IT decision makers to more deeply understand the considerations for self-service data preparation at scale and how Tableau Prep Conductor can help manage a governed data prep environment.

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