A business intelligence (BI) tool is an excellent gateway into advanced analytics and data science. At Solita, we have helped many organizations scale their visual analytics and business intelligence using Tableau. However, data visualization is (as Hadley Wickham points out in R for Data Science) a fundamental human activity. At some point, analysts and data scientists start to think about how they can abstract visualizations into something that can be automated and this is typically when we start to think about statistical modelling and machine learning.

Many of our clients come to us asking how they can use data science and advanced analytics to enrich their BI tools. Of course, there are many different ways to do this and the most suitable solution will depend on all of your other infrastructure. But if you have a data scientist that has used R or Python to build something that cannot (or should not) be done in a BI tool, there are some practices that you can use and that we recommend.

In our upcoming joint webinar with RStudio, Using R & Python to Augment Tableau, we will discuss a case from one of our clients, one of Sweden’s largest government agencies, that exemplifies these practices. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, a team of Solita data engineers, analysts and data scientists have helped the agency collect data and visualize it with Tableau.

Two of our data scientists realized that the visualized data could be used to make forecasts for an important part of their operation. They built a minimal viable product to explore this idea and got buy-in from management. During this webinar, we will walk through this case and how we successfully have combined open-source data science with Tableau. But more importantly, we will have a discussion on where we go from here.

Realizing one data science project is vastly different from realizing 10 data science projects. Typically, data science projects bring great value in the beginning, but if we don’t think about how to scale data science, there is a risk of getting caught in a maintenance trap. Instead of realizing more use cases, we are stuck maintaining old projects with home-built solutions. The data scientist gets tired of all the maintenance, quits for a new job, and we are back to square one.

In this webinar, we will talk about how you can combine RStudio’s professional products and Tableau to avoid the maintenance trap and successfully scale data science using two great tools together.

See you there!

Filip Wästberg, Jesper Ludvigsen and Vilgot Österlund from Solita

Watch our webinar with Solita on Using R & Python to Augment Tableau below: