Tableau – the new SAMIEE
Some of you may have recently been invited to try out the new SAMIEE/OBIEE/database viewer called Tableau. Tonight was my turn at the wheel. I missed the tutorial which happened during my extensive travels this summer but got a link to the dashboard and decided to dive right in. Here’s a brief rundown on my experience.
First of all, compared to its two previous incarnations, Tableau is a breeze for the most part. The link took me to a ‘landing page’ which was attractively arranged as a grid of six colorful blocks outlining different ways of visualizing the IEEE membership database: Membership, Students, Volunteers, Societies, Doublet, and Map. Societies is cryptically named ‘Memberships, Subscriptions, and More’, and the even more cryptic ‘Doublet’ is simply a cross reference of membership in one or more societies. Chapter officers will be interested in those two and others will most likely use the first three more often. The map feature is just
kind of fun but would be more useful if you could drill down to the section level.
I found Tableau to be considerably more intuitive than OBIEE ever was and substantially faster. Unfortunately it’s
not magic and is still stuck with the same old database and the same old problems: out-of-date, missing, or confusing data. For example, students are placed into a geographic location by their listed home address. Consequently Region 5 appears at first glance to have a huge number of student branches, scattered all over the world! One new feature that I haven’t noticed before is a list of previous volunteers in a particular position. For example, it was very simple to get a list of previous North Area chairmen.
If you are a SAMIEE user and haven’t tried Tableau yet, I encourage you to do so. You might be pleasantly surprised!