Freakonomics’ Stephen J Dubner just added as a Keynote for 2010 Customer Conference

The line-up of speakers and content for the 2010 Tableau Customer Conference just keeps getting better! Just added for Wednesday morning’s keynote, best-selling writer and co-author of Freakonomics, Stephen J Dubner. From the corridors of academia to the grimiest street corners, Stephen Dubner is sure to bring us stories inspired by engineers and astrophysicists, psychotic killers and emergency-room doctors, amateur historians and transgender neuroscientists. If you like Freakonomics or Superfreakonomics as well as many of us at Tableau do, be sure and bring your book copies. He’ll be doing book signings Wednesday morning.

In addition, we are adding a new pre-conference workshop on Designing, Building and Maintaining Dashboards with Tableau, taught by Stephen McDaniel, Freakalytics co-founder and author of Rapid Graphs with Tableau. Through a mix of lecture and hands-on training, this session will teach you best practices for successfully building and deploying business dashboards. This workshop in addition to Stephen Few’s Visual Business Intelligence Workshop and the two Tableau Certification Workshops have shaped up to make Monday a can’t miss day of this year’s conference.

That’s not all – we’ve just finished updating the schedule with new sessions, additional content, and more sneak-previews into upcoming Tableau 6.0 features and functionality. You can check out all of the sessions and information about this year’s conference at: http://conference.tableausoftware.com.

One last quick reminder – this coming June 4th is the discount deadline for this year’s conference. Use registration code SWEETDEAL to save $255 off the conference price. Register today.

How many full time HR employees does your organization need?

Steve Wexler at i4cp is frequently asked a difficult question: "How many full time HR employees should my organization have." In an attempt to answer it, Steve enlisted Tableau Public and a recent HR survey to create the following visualization. The viz evaluates the 850 companies in the survey based on the number of full time HR employees they have and how successful the organization is as a whole (based on revenue growth, profitability and customer satisfaction). Take advantage of the interactivity to find out how many HR employees your organization should have.

Broadly, the bottom chart tells us that the highest performing organizations have slightly more full time HR employees than the lower performers. If you select a smaller organization size, say 1 to 99, this difference is magnified, perhaps because smaller organizations are growing faster and need more attention per employee. Although every situation is unique, this viz seems to show that it is better to err on the side of excess with HR employees, than be caught with too few hands!

What we like about this viz

Labels: The data labels on the "Ratio" view make it much easier to quickly understand the content of the viz. Instead of having to mouse over for a tooltip, users can just read.

Vizzing the Sunlight Design for America Contest

Take a look at the visualizations we created for the Sunlight Foundations Design for America contest. Best of luck to all of our fellow contestants - there are some very cool interactive apps and vizzes that have already been submitted. Sorry, our vizzes are way too big to fit in our blog, so you have to click out the old fashioned way!

• State Campaign Contributions - See who received the most campaign contributions... and from who! This viz takes a look at state level campaign contributions for 2009, using data compiled by Transparencydata.org.

• National Obesity Comparison Tool - Obesity is perhaps the most pressing of all American health concerns. This app uses CDC data to allow anyone with internet access to see how their community compares to their state and the nation as a whole across several important metrics related to obesity.

• Stimulus Efficiency Tool - Ever driven by a road sign that says "This Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act"? The stimulus at work. However, if you are anything like me, you occasionally wonder how many people are being put to work by those projects and how much the government spent to do it. Use this tool to search for the most job inefficient projects by state (the projects that created the fewest jobs per dollar spent). Visit Recovery.gov to get the data.

• Government contracts without competition - Competition in government contracts is an essential part of any functioning democracy. Without it, waste and cronyism multiply exponentially. This tool has several uses. Citizens can look for the agencies that are distributing an excessive amount of non-competitive contracts and encourage their elected representatives to combat it. Corporations can use the "Select Category" tool to narrow down the list to their industry and find jobs that they might have missed out on. When they come up again, they will know to bid! Last but not least, this is a report card for government workers and elected representatives who should encourage competitive bidding so that this viz has no purpose. See USA Spending for the data.

Riding the Dow Rollercoaster

Thursday marked the second largest single day drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average since the Great Depression. However, the rebound on Friday was similarly robust. The shock was violent enough to encourage regulators to push for updated computer models at the nations leading stock exchanges. The viz below details every drop greater than 5% since 1928- check it out!

The "valley" that you can see in the top graph is an alarming one. Essentially, there were only three major drops (>5% drop from previous days close) from 1950-1979. There have been 43 since 1980. Although this is nowhere near the number for the 1930's, it clearly shows a return to more volatile markets.

What we like about this viz

Staggered interactivity: It is natural for the eye to move from top to bottom while reading or viewing a viz. This viz takes advantage of that tendency by using the top view as a filter.

2010 Tableau Customer Conference

August 30 – September 2, 2010 | Seattle, WA

Planning for the 3rd annual Tableau Customer Conference is officially in full-swing. We’re been working hard to make sure we have an incredible line-up of speakers, hands-on learning labs, and new ways to network and connect with fellow attendees. Based on the quality of content and learning opportunities we have lined-up, I am confident that this year’s conference will the best year yet.

Having planned the past two conferences, it’s exciting to see new ideas come to life and to integrate the great ideas and feedback from past year’s attendees. I’d love to give you a quick preview of all the awesome things you can expect from this year’s conference.

BUT FIRST - you need to know that if you register by June 4th, can save $255! Use registration code SWEETDEAL to save $255 on conference registration. Registrations are already flooding in for this year’s conference so now’s the time to guarantee your place and to save some money.

Based on the overwhelming feedback from last year’s conference, we are bringing back Garr Reynolds and Stephen Few to continue to enlighten us on the path to presentation Zen. We’re also bringing back the popular Developer’s on Stage, hosted by Co-founder and CDO, Chris Stolte, technology visionary and Co-founder, Pat Hanrahan, and Co-founder and CEO, Christian Chabot. Keep your eyes peeled for updates on our final mystery keynote speaker who will be announced in the very near future.

We really raised the bar this year on the quality of content for this year’s conference. In four days we’re offering 14 hours of sessions by industry experts, 26 hours of hands-on training, and 10 hours of demonstrated success stories from our customers. In addition to that, we will be having product feedback sessions and multiple opportunities for attendees to get their hands on unreleased new product features in our Beta Lab.

We now offer two levels of Tableau Certification offered through pre-conference workshops on Monday, August 30. Attend one of these workshops to become a Tableau Certified Professional, or if already a Certified Pro, we will be offering a Tableau Certified Master workshop. Also new this year, we are offering a post-conference Partner Education Training workshop to empower our Partners to be more successful in the field. Additional pre-conference sessions include Stephen Few’s Visual Business Intelligence workshop and - just added - Freakalytics Dashboarding best practices session with Stephen McDaniel.

This year’s doctor’s sessions will be better than ever. This personalized one-on-one time with Tableau experts is practically reason enough to attend. We have an expanded staff of doctors this year to help with all types of ailments, doling out prescriptions for continued success with Tableau. Stay tuned for more information about how to make appointments ahead of time and planning tips for making the most of your appointment.

This year’s conference will be packed with new opportunities to help you connect with fellow Tableau junkies. In addition to the Welcome Reception and Customer Party, we’ve added an Industry Networking Reception, and a set of meeting rooms for you to host your own session, meet-up, or a small group discussion. We’ll have additional resources and ways for you to connect with User Groups or help you start your own group in your area. Either way, you’ll walk away from this year’s conference armed with new connections and tips for making the most of your Tableau community.

If there are things you want to see at this year’s conference – speak up! Post questions, requests, comments, ideas, etc to the comments section of this post.

For more information about this year’s conference and to register, visit the conference website at http://conference.tableausoftware.com.