It’s no secret that some people hear about Tableau’s passionate users and wonder what all the fuss is about. Back in June, in fact, one skeptical industry analyst tweeted to a Tableau fan, “Pal, you seem to have had a bit too much Tableau Kool-Aid.”

Tableau users I know just shrug. People who say things like that find passion for data suspicious, and there’s nothing you can do for them.

Then Tableau itself invited a delegation of industry analysts, most of them from the traditional end of BI, to its annual conference at the Encore hotel in Las Vegas. The company hopes for their blessing to make that leap across the chasm from early adoption to early majority.

My big question: Would the industry “influencers” and Tableau’s influential users play nice together?

I hang out with both groups, the doubters and the devoted. I do periodic retreats to TDWI and other events. I’ve also been an observer of Tableau since 2008 when I blogged that “Tableau is the new Apple.” I have no stake in Tableau’s success except that I think it’s a strong part of BI’s dream fulfilled, a bearer of fruit.

Experts can quibble over its limitations all they want to, but they must acknowledge one thing: It excites users. Few other tools do.

I spotted trouble on the first morning. In the opening keynote, CEO Christian Chabot had invoked one of his favorite themes: how Tableau would “change this tired, paternalistic BI order.” As usual, he got applause. To illustrate an anecdote about dairies, he pulled out a bottle of milk and poured himself a glass. Things were going well.

But about then, an industry expert tweeted from somewhere in the audience. He hinted at a suspicion of Kool-Aid: “It’s just a visualization tool with publishing capabilities.”

He might as well have asked what these 1400 or so nut cases were doing there, packed into that ballroom? Why, going by numbers from Tableau CMO Elissa Fink, did Experian send 17 people, Apple 19, and eBay 35? Did they come for the gambling, the shows, and a sweet sip of delusion?

Two special meetings with Tableau founders and the delegation of experts went better. As we sipped water from the Encore’s handsome tumblers, Chabot and fellow founders Chris Stolte and Pat Hanrahan talked about business plans and technology. Most of the influencers asked about the technology. We’ll have to watch their blogs for reactions.

Eventually, we left technology for more interesting, big picture questions. Neil Raden, of Constellation Research, asked how the company would grow and still satisfy the new demands of the broad new audience? Other technology vendors have stumbled on this. I asked a similar question: If they do as everyone expects and offer an IPO, how would their passion and vision endure under the new pressures?

The gist of both answers: They said they’re not doing this for the money, and they’ll continue to be driven by the same passion for a great tool, and that they’ll be guided by the same integrity. Cynics will scoff, but I believe them.

Meanwhile, out on “the street,” influential Tableau users expressed harsh opinions of the BI regulars.

One man with long experience in business intelligence and data warehousing, whose employer prohibits public statements, called the general class of BI experts “process junkies.” He said, “They don’t understand that I have this data and I want to understand what it tells me. It doesn’t fit.”

Similarly blunt: “I don’t care what these supposed experts think,” said Dan Murray, a longtime Tableau user and chief operating officer of InterWorks Inc, a fast-growing technology consultancy. The company is listed in the Inc. 5000, and it attributes much of its growth to database development and Tableau visualization.

“The BI people are back where we were a long time ago,” said Murray. “We’re past that.” To him, the people who really matter in data analysis now are the ones with passion for data analysis. He said, “Those are the superstars.”

Just who the superstars are marks the line between those who’ve had the “Kool-Aid” and the BI regulars. Most of the usual experts seem to live in the backend, where database administrators and other geeks rule. Back there, the game is all about process and data hygiene. The experts love to talk about all that, and only a few actually analyze data.

Up where the data analysts work, it’s all about analyzing data. They take seriously all the factors that the mainstream BI world does — such as data quality and data governance — but always with the end in mind, not as ends in themselves.

Ask them what they like about Tableau and their answers come down to one point: the thing gets out of the way and let them work almost as fast as they can think. It does so far better than any other data tool they’ve known. They feel that the tool is designed with them in mind — not for any purchaser, not for any security goon, and for not any consultant’s ego.

They are passionate. I had gone to dinner with a half dozen Tableau users when one wondered aloud about the Las Vegas airport’s on-time record. Someone had his laptop along, loaded with FAA data from an earlier analysis. We found seats in a bar near the casino and looked at the data. I don’t know of many others for whom data analysis beats ESPN.

We ordered beers.

Howard Dresner is a celebrity in the business intelligence industry, but most people at last year’s Tableau conference didn’t even recognize him when he showed up there.

Who needs BI? Tableau Software liked to think it had left BI behind. BI people, after all, were the control freaks who denied access to data. They sneered at Tableau’s “pretty pictures.” They cared more about data hygiene than data analysis.

But there he was. Stephen Few spotted him in the audience a few minutes into his keynote and paused to wonder if it was really him. Tableau vice president of marketing Elissa Fink welcomed him. I and some others said hello. Mostly he wandered alone.

But he’s coming back this year — to speak. He’ll be among 10 on the “experts track” at the Tableau Customer Conference in Las Vegas. Others include BI veteran Claudia Imhoff, Cindi Howson of “BI Scorecard,” and Performance Dashboards author Wayne Eckerson.

They’re all worth listening to. But the one most Tableau people would feel at home with is Paul Kedrosky. Unlike the others, he’s not from the BI world at all. He’s an “investor, speaker, writer, media guy, and entrepreneur,” according to his blog’s “about” page. But I know him as the man who counts ladders.

At last fall’s Defrag conference in Boulder, he told about using the California Highway Patrol’s count of fallen ladders on freeways as a leading economic indicator. Who says data must come from conventional sources? He’s serious and creative, a mix Tableau people appreciate.

He’s written that we live in a “golden age of data visualization,” but I’ve found no elaboration. I’ll be listening for that.

As for the other nine “experts,” the first thing I’ll look for is the size of their audiences.

The TDWI keynote speaker who told about jogging with a chip in his shoe is coming back. Frank Buytendijk, always entertaining and thought provoking, will be the Monday morning keynote speaker at next February’s TDWI conference in Las Vegas, according to TDWI education director Paul Kautza this morning.

The chip counted his steps, which gave him reason to run. It seemed like his only reason, he recalled in a TDWI keynote two years ago. One day he returned after only 10 minutes. His wife asked, “What, is it raining?” No, the battery had run down and there was no reason to run.

Frank emails from home in the Netherlands that he’ll speak on “philosophy, discussing truth, reality and what is good.”

Until February, read his weblog. See “Medieval Best Practices,” “What is fact-based, anyway?,” and “Marx, Google and Facebook.”

There’s nothing like a Tableau release. No one but Tableau users tweet so exuberantly, not even a flock of birds at dawn. What’s going on here?

This week Tableau Software released version 6.1, on paper just a single decimal point up from last fall’s Six. We got more iPad readiness, improved maps, and other handy improvements. But to read Twitter, this was a much bigger deal than that.

No, I don’t work for Tableau. I just know it when I see something going on. People love this tool. I’ve seen few other products of any type loved so much — perhaps not since backyard mechanics tinkered with Volkswagen bugs, or Mac people discovered icons, or designers found Adobe Illustrator.

I read one cynic this summer sneer about “Kool-Aid,” as if to be so enthused is to have entered a death pact with zombies.

I don’t know what flavor Kool-Aid such sneering BI zombies are hooked on, but it’s their loss. What’s going on must be too simple for their tortured minds: Users love tools that respond. Not that learning them is always easy. But once learned, good tools prove capable, consistent, and simple.

Imagine how much fun the customer conferences are. They’re one of the few business events where, instead of talking about solving problems, people actually do solve them.

As Stephen Few delivered his keynote address at the recent Tableau customer conference in Seattle, he suddenly broke his rhythm to look at someone in the audience. “Is that Howard Dresner?” he wondered, surprised.

It was. Howard is the man who as a Gartner analyst in 1989 revived the term “business intelligence,” and he’s one of the industry’s patriarchs. He holds a seat on the TDWI faculty, and he founded Gartner’s business intelligence event.

In that world, Tableau is still an insurgent. Tableau usually bypasses IT buyers on its way to data analysts, who only want to soak insight from data and then show others the results. Many Tableau users are veterans of miserable, lockstep interfaces procured by those IT buyers and made by IT-facing vendors. That at least partly explains why Stephen Few’s evisceration of the Business Objects interface seemed to delight just about everyone in the audience. Even Howard called it “wildly entertaining.”

Two mornings before, Tableau CEO Christian Chabot had started the fire. In his Monday morning keynote, he made allusions to Apple’s “1984″ ad, then went into Tableau 6 — using FAA data on another variety of Big Brother: the airlines on which most of the crowd had arrived in Seattle. Both keynotes were as much fun to watch as the wild flames of a bonfire or a public execution.

Now and then, though, I had to check the exits. My inner skeptic always questions such fervor. I subscribe to no guru, no preacher, no righteous political philosophy, nor any movement that’s “green,” “red,” or “blue.” When you glimpse the underside, they’re all too ugly to bear.

But, again and again, I’ve seen that this is not any of that. The Tableau crowd is simply a bunch of people who’ve found a good, honest tool that responds the way good tools do. They have fun listening to the keynotes, but most Tableau users themselves are about as fired up as chess enthusiasts or weekend car mechanics. They’ve adopted something that’s logical, responsive, and economical, in which the simple interface encourages experimentation and learning.

One of the only signs of celebration was giddy tweeting. I suppose that was hard to take for some. One BI biggie — perhaps speaking for the Ministry of Truth — grumbled in a tweet from far away that there was “no silver bullet,” but most Tableau users don’t follow him and don’t care. Others, such as Howard Dresner and Microsoft lead for BI strategy Bruno Aziza both showed up to see what it was all about.

The conference was sold out. Total paid attendance was around 700 — more than twice last year, which was significantly higher than the first year. Most user conferences, in fact, declined this year and last. This year’s total was also in the same range as TDWI World Conference in San Diego, held just two weeks earlier, and not too far away from the 1000 or so that Howard Dresner says Gartner often attracts.

At this rate, says CEO Christian Chabot, the conference will be forced out of Seattle next year and possibly longer. The only space that will hold a larger crowd than this year’s would be space mashups within an easy walk of each other, and that’s not available next year. Tableau is already looking at San Francisco and other cities, even Las Vegas.

One user, now back home in Lithuania, pondered the future: Giedre Aleknonyte, a data analyst at a phone carrier, said “You know how people say they’ll ‘Google’ to find out some information, even when they don’t actually use Google? Maybe someday when we want to analyze data we’ll say, ‘I’ll just tableau it.’”

Does it seem to you like data analysis is busting out all over the place? It might become another fun game like chess or Chutes and Ladders — so this might be good time to recall an old admonition: Don’t just consume data, mind its pedigree.

Repeating the warning, though, makes you look like a party-pooper. In 2007 at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas, a keynote speaker raised it one morning. Jonathan Koomey — author of Turning Numbers into Knowledge and one of those voices the BI world needs more of — did his best. But I could see the unfolding disaster from my banquet table, as attendees glanced at each other in scorn. When the lights went up, not one person raised a hand with any question or comment.

Now Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict, edited by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, tries it again.

You may wonder what sex, body counts, and politics have to do with data analysis, but try to keep an open mind here. The book promises to let us spit out the usual cud of business intelligence, data quality, and get to the real spice: the politics of data. I can’t wait to read it. For now, see Jack Shafer’s review on Slate.

I won’t be surprised if the book points out how each organization’s core group subtly chooses the stories its data tells. I’ve just finished Art Kleiner’s Who Really Matters, which goes into detail on these groups’ formation and influence, including how they define who’s in, who’s out, and why. It’s the essence of politics.

Though core-group members may not ever lay their smooth palms on any data, data is nonetheless coiffed to suit these people. Through layers of managerial interpretation and re-interpretation, their influence cascades all the way down to tiny decisions about how data’s summarized, what’s measured, how it’s measured, and who measures it.

Like other forms of expression within an organization — speech, email, jargon, attire, hair style, suit or T-shirt — data is part of the politics. Though this has a big effect on decision making, it seems rare that I find it on a BI-event agenda. BI’s scope needs to widen.

So many people who should know better seem to miss the point when they mention Tableau. Why? I asked BI veteran Stephen McDaniel for his thoughts — which he gave, but then went on to suggest an almost unheard of challenge: a data analysis face-off among vendors.

Consider this description by a BI analyst: “Tableau provides business analysts speed of thought visual analysis on data held in memory on their desktop machines.” All that’s fine, but it may as well have been about a whole bunch of other tools, too.

At the root of this fuzz, explained McDaniel, is that most analysts who concern themselves with tools don’t actually use the tools. They rely on demos , marketing, and hearsay.

Though much of McDaniel’s recent work has centered on Tableau — his second book is Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software and he gives training sessions around the country — he also has a long, credible trail back through BI and data mining. He was director of analytics at Netflix, and has worked with more than 50 companies in BI. His first book was SAS for Dummies.

“I love SAS,” he says. Still, he remembers his sister in law’s reaction to his book on SAS. She was not an analyst but a “people manager.” These are the ones, he says, who have hated BI because “it had been made into a priesthood.” When she had looked through the book, she said, “Oh, this is great” and put it down. But she read the Tableau book for a half hour and said, “You should come talk to some people I work with.” She had recognized what she could do with the tool.

McDaniel’s sister in law and many like her don’t care whether the data is “in memory,” they don’t see themselves as business analysts, they take “desktop” for granted, and they know “speed of thought” is just gloss.

The list of features really doesn’t matter. All that really matters is whether someone can do what needs to be done with the tool.

McDaniel imagines a throw down, a data analysis match. It would be open to any BI vendor. Each vendor would send their best people, and each team would receive a uniform set of data. Over some defined period, teams would analyze and then present the results to a panel of vendor-neutral judges.

The reward? Perhaps a signed copy of a Stephen McDaniel book, or maybe a beer, possibly both. But certainly, repute.

What do you think of the face-off idea? Please write a comment.

Lyzasoft wasn’t among the 38 exhibitors in TDWI’s Las Vegas exhibit hall. Lyzasoft sponsored no part of the lunch, and they hired no stage magician. But their buzz was the loudest I heard over the event’s five days.

Others may have heard different buzz because buzz varies. Business intelligence elites gather every year at TDWI’s big Las Vegas event to teach, and they end up schmoozing, too. Over beer, food, and sometimes playing cards, they compare notes.

Is anyone seeking a consensus? I suppose someone might, but the interesting ones just play with ideas, reflect on what others say, make a joke, and think about it. If there’s any “truth,” it develops during a lot of talk and thought, whether it’s about politics, tofu, the future of passenger rail in America, or business. That goes for any kind of conversation, whether the medium is words or data.

In business, the conversation is somehow forgotten in favor of the data. But to Scott Davis, CEO of Lyzasoft, the conversation is critical to understanding the data. “A chart has no context at all,” he said in mid February. “The conversation is what’s really valuable.”

The conversation-free, top-down “single version of the truth” isn’t always useful for those who need to manage data for specific uses and contexts. Its “truth” may in fact be no better than Soviet planners’ forecasts of market demand for women’s lingerie. “A single version of the truth,” said Third Nature research director Mark Madsen in Las Vegas, “is true for a single beat of the corporate heart.”

Enter Lyza 2, Lyzasoft’s new version of its data-wrangling and collaboration tool made for data analysts determined to create truth for specific uses and context. The first edition of Lyza offered Excel-like personalization. In the new edition, collaboration seems to have been the guide.

You could see this year’s improvements coming in last year’s email from Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis: “Even though they are quants, their world is personal,” he wrote. “Relationships are vital. They think in terms of ‘who do I know who knows X type of information sources?’” He could have also been talking about journalists, artists, and anyone else who has to hear signals within noise.

In the new edition, Lyza encourages fluid interactions with a variety of social-media tools: email, Twitter-like messaging, SMS messaging, bookmark collections with annotations, and other tools track and fortify discussion. Lyza lets people work easily with other smart people they trust. If “Steve” believes that “Brian’s” work is good and “George’s” work is not, he can work with only Brian’s data. It also publishes to the new tool, Lyza Commons, for even greater collaboration while retaining users’ ability to interact with data. Lyza 2 loves a good conversation.

The data and everything that happens to it gets tracked automatically. Unlike in Excel worksheets, changes are transparent. Automatic documenting allows any change to be dug up and fixed. If only the data-free conversations in politics and other parts of business had such a tool.

I was surprised to hear spontaneous praise for Lyza’s new version. eLearningCurve education director Dave Wells and Third Nature principal and one of the event’s keynote speakers Mark Madsen both did. I heard the same from several other BI experts, too. Madsen even gave a brief look at Lyza in his Executive Summit presentation on the future of BI.

I harmonize with people who appreciate Lyza at least partly because I think it’s smart to let people work the way they want to work — the way people have always worked. They prefer working with people they trust and with tools that respond. Everything else is static.

My friend Marco’s spam-bait operation was down last year, and he’s been asking me what business intelligence can do for him. He had just read one of TDWI’s promo emails last night when he called me again.

“I like Vegas. Should I go?” he asked from somewhere that sounded far away. I said it all depended on what he wanted to learn. Is making sense of his data important? If yes, go. But there seemed to be more to his question.

He’s gone through one shady business after another since the early ’60s, when as a teenager he sold drugs on the street. Now he sells fake email addresses in huge blocks to Eastern European spammers. All his customers have had a good education, he tells me, yet most retain some of their families’ traditional ways. He describes them picking over his blocks of email addresses as if over oranges in a bin, rejecting one, taking another. They seem to rely entirely on feel, and Marco makes sure each new batch feels “fresh” and authentic year after year.

“Cool. My data’s real, real important to me,” said Marco. “So’s my know-how, my experiments, my research. Those experts in Vegas dish on how to manage all that, man?”

Definitely the data, I said, but not much on the qualitative end of his research. He was disappointed. 

“You know, you got me going on this insight thing, man,” he said. “And then you change the story. This business intelligence takes care of only some of my insight? Only some of it? What do they think, data’s the only way you get insight?”

He had a point. I thought fast. I said he should think of his operation like a speeding car. He liked that. I said he needed a “dashboard” to let him know how he was doing. He liked that, too. There was a course on Tuesday, I said, all about that.

“Cool, man. But what about my research? I got these journals I keep with my results and theories and shit like that. What about all that? I keep losing track of it all.”

I said I thought he was talking about knowledge management or something. 

“Yeah, that sounds like what I want. Knowledge management. They don’t do that there?” 

I explained that data was this event’s main focus. Other events … but he cut me off.

“No, man. Here’s what it’s about,” he said. “It’s all about marketing. I don’t know much about business intelligence, but I bet that every benefit, feature, whatever comes from a different tool. Each comes from a different vendor,” he said in a tired sing-song, “and the producers of this event have a line on a certain kind of vendor. To protect their game, they make up a category. Get hip, man. It’s always like that.” 

He quickly added, as if he had already bored himself, “How’s the food there? Can a guy score somethin’ to eat?”

The best Caesar’s can offer, I said. Then he had to go answer the door. I heard urgent knocking.

How refreshing to stumble into a trade show that has its eyes on users and their collaboration. Enterprise 2.0 came to San Francisco early this month, and I liked what I saw.

Take, for example, Liquid Planner, the hosted project manager. Unlike conventional planners, it makes no demand for the single completion date, so laughable in practice. This planner avoids roulette thinking by asking instead for a range of dates — much easier to believe in.

“One of the biggest problems in business is keeping people engaged,” says Liquid Planner CEO Charles Seybold. “If they’re not engaged, they go away.” They disown data they’re supposed to engage with, and that accelerates their drift away from corporate goals.

The planner also makes use of collaboration in email, Twitter, and other media to measure progress, obstacles, and project creep. Did you and a bunch of coworkers sketch a revised timeline on a paper napkin at lunch? Even that could be scanned and added to the mix.

“It’s all about people working together,” says Seybold. “It’s all social” — an obvious but usually ignored fact about business.

Other vendors make more general use of social media. SocialText, for example, picks up on social media to give overall business collaboration a push. It’s already got about 5,000 customers around the world, according to the man at the SocialText booth who rattled off the features: an iGoogle-like dashboard, secure and selective access, open standards, and so on. The pricing looked engaging, too: free for operations with fewer than 50 users, then $5 per user per month.

Away from the exhibition, 116 attendees packed a room to hear Linden Labs announce a business version of its virtual world Second Life, Second Life Enterprise.

Remember when people were impressed with a computer singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do”? The virtual meeting Linden Labs used in the announcement will someday be compared to TV productions of the early ’50s. Eventually, Second Life Enterprise will work out the kinks and start to walk, run, sing, and dance. As I wrote in May, someday we’ll see serious what-if scenario gaming.

This is the future of intelligent business.