Whitepaper

A New Approach to Business Intelligence: Rapid-fire BI

Authors
Dr. Chris Stolte, VP, Engineering - Tableau Software,
Dr. Pat Hanrahan, Chief Scientist and co-founder Tableau Software
Dan Jewett, VP, Product Management - Tableau Software,

What is this new generation of business intelligence? Whether you've heard it called new BI, self service BI or rapid-fire BI, this whitepaper will help you and your IT team make sense of what it is, how to identify it and how you and your organization can benefit.

Business intelligence initiatives continue to top CIO priorities, as executives and managers demand greater visibility into business data much faster. Traditional business intelligence platforms have fallen short of delivering rapid analytics and insights. But that's changing. A new kind of BI is here: rapid-fire BI.

Rapid-fire BI is a new approach to providing true business intelligence delivering dramatically better business results. While traditional BI platforms perfected scheduled, parameterized reports, they do not do what they now espouse: provide self-service business intelligence.

This paper addresses the key attributes of a Rapid-Fire BI Solution:

  • User-Driven Approach
  • Easy Visual Interfaces
  • Flexible Configurations
  • High Performance
  • Easy Administration

Rapid-fire BI provides end-user freedom in an environment that leverages existing IT infrastructure and recognizes that not all data is in the enterprise data warehouse. It’s about where people can take advantage of the new generation of easy visual interfaces and visual intelligence that make trends and outliers easy to detect. And it’s about low cost of ownership. It grows to fit your needs on your timeline, leverages your existing infrastructure as much as possible and never requires long implementation phases or specialty technical skills.

About the authors

Dr. Chris Stolte, VP, Engineering - Tableau Software

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Dr. Pat Hanrahan

Chief Scientist and co-founder Tableau Software

Pat Hanrahan is Tableau Software's Chief Scientist. He is also the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he teaches computer graphics. His current research involves visualization, image synthesis, and graphics systems and architectures. Before joining Stanford he was a faculty member at Princeton. Pat has also worked at Pixar where he developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the RenderMan Interface - a protocol that allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs. Pat has received two Academy Awards for Science and Technology, the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award, and the IEEE Visualization Career Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dan Jewett, VP, Product Management - Tableau Software