This week, my colleague Nick Jastrzebski is over in San Francisco presenting to SalesForce's developer conference - TrailblazerDX - about monetising your data with Tableau. In this blog, we're going to cover a quick summary of what this is and how Tableau can help get your product off the ground quickly!
Your expertise in your data can create a great product or a competitive advantage.
Data as a product can deepen the relationship you have with customers, suppliers or partners.
The way that you use your data to gain insight is also valuable, not just the data itself.
As subject matter experts, you’re in a position to lead with innovation and discuss your data with your customers.
Data Monetisation has been talked about for a long time, but many organisations never realise the potential of it because they get stuck inside the nuts and bolts of New Product Development - how to build a portal, which data should be included, how to market such a product, and how to secure customer specific data. Tableau’s embedding solutions allow you to get past the how of building quickly and, therefore, jump in to building a better relationship with your customers and demonstrating the value of your data to them. The product possibilities that Tableau can support are pretty flexible, and include creating your own portal with an embedded dashboards that can deliver customised data; integrate dashboards into your existing portals, or embedded applications, which takes a component like Tableau Pulse, or Data Stories, and adds this into an existing product.
At The Information Lab, we have worked with all three of these examples and understand the demands of the data and technology in order to get them deployed. If you'd like some inspiration for dashboards, which could be part of a specific portal or embedded in an existing one, you can view our showcase here. The dashboards themselves are embedded within the portal to give you a preview of how this can look even on a very simple website layout.
But how can I secure it?
This is the most common question arising when developing a product which monetises your data. You need to secure it somehow, and in many cases, the product might end up showing specific data for each customer - only their orders or invoices, for example. When working on this with clients, we like to use a solution called Connected Apps, which works with Tableau to authenticate a user when they sign in via your portal, providing a secure and seamless experience.
Connected Apps can feel a little bit technical but our CTO, Craig Bloodworth, has a great tutorial site explaining how to get up and running using them here.
Ready to try it out?
Great! You can get started experimenting with embedding and building a product with Tableau's Embedding Playground, which you can launch here. The Embedding Playground allows you to prototype an analytics product and understand how your portal or existing website can interact with the Embedding API to add functionality to your product. Once you've finished experimenting, you can also export what you've built in JavaScript and HTML, which can be folded into your existing development codebase and sprint process.
The Embedding Playground makes it easy to develop in a fast and iterative way, allowing you to collaborate with colleagues and customers to build a great product. As you are working, don't forget the following principles;
Your data and your perspective on it is unique - and that's valuable for other people, not just you and your organisation.
If your data and insight are worth sharing, protect it! Build products utilising solutions like Connected Apps to ensure that revenue and value are secured.
Lastly, while data might be everywhere, insight is what people want - and that's what Tableau is about.
Good luck on your embedding journey!
Still have a few questions?
Let us know! You can contact us at info@theinformationlab.co.uk . Happy Embedding!