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.

What the early days of desktop publishing may tell about today’s self-service BI. Read all about it in my latest column at Information Management.

See my latest column in BI This Week (TDWI), “6 Conditions for the Rise of Business Analysts.”

As they rise, analysts may end up ruining the neighborhood for both IT and business people.

“Don’t bother me with petty distinctions between BI, analytics and decision support. I want meaning, not tools for their own sake – and here I see glimmers.”

Read it here.

Twenty tweets the first day!

Visualized data seems as natural as eating and sleeping, doesn’t it? Yet the first economic time-series wasn’t plotted until 1786, according to our patriarch of viz Edward Tufte in his 1983 book Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

What took so long? I suppose humanity really did suffer from lack of an Excel chart wizard. People had been making maps for centuries, but apparently no one had made the leap from maps to abstract quantities like time and money. That wasn’t so easy to do, after all. You can’t just scratch numbers in your clay, you have to think about it first.

It all comes back to what’s probably already a cliche: simple is hard.

Still, what took so long?

This afternoon, I finally closed the long-running survey of “those who analyze data.” The results are seeping in to Datadoodle headquarters. I’ll release them in stages over the next two months: first, highlights, then more highlights, and finally a preview report and a final report.

I opened it in mid-February this year. It has 221 responses. I’d say that’s a good number from a small platform like this weblog in this survey-saturated industry.

In case you didn’t realize it, I’m no data analyst myself. My stint in market research that ended more than 10 years ago entailed little data grooming, reshaping, or cleansing. Someone did it for me, and only then would I paw through it. But today, it’s all up to me — me and my handful of data-savvy volunteers.

I’ll identify and thank each one publicly as things progress, along with a few people who helped promote the survey.

The very first look will probably come in my columns at BI This Week (TDWI) and Information Management. After that, I’ll issue a report, first in a preview edition for respondents who asked for it and a few others.

Just watch this space for links.

Everyone’s talking about collaboration — but what culture and tools does it take to succeed? Six principles emerged from a discussion among experts at the Pacific Northwest BI Summit in July.

Even among this moderate crowd, an old tension showed itself. BI has always had what I’ve thought of as “data police,” those who stress data quality, security, and process at the expense of natural workflows. On the other end, “data libertarians” have used self-service tools to wrest control of their data analysis and data itself — an approach that has made more sense to me. If BI is about business, why leave it up to a cabal of technicians?

Read all about it in my BI This Week column. It appears tonight. Here.

If no one sees a piece of data, does it exist? Andrew Walkingshaw asks in his post “Data as process.”

Data only exists inasmuch as it supports either communication or decision-making. When it’s not being looked at, whether by a person or a process, it’s as if it had never been at all.

Instead, he writes, data is really about processes.

How do people make decisions? How do they communicate and support their viewpoints? These processes are supported by technology, but they’re rooted in psychology and economics.

He goes further.

I hate to be so timely, but I saw a Steve Jobs quote today that I like.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

He’s talking about design, but it goes for so many other things we do in the analytics industry, such as visualization, business analysis, public speaking, and writing.

So often, I struggle through someone’s blog post, webinar, or viz only to wish I hadn’t. The payoff was too small. Had the author given it more thought, it might have become something or at least my effort would have seemed worth it.

Sometimes I’m a complete idiot. I’ve been writing a monthly column for TDWI’s BI This Week since the beginning of 2011 — after a break of almost two years — and I have never posted a link. No good self promoter would have neglected to do that.

Well, here’s a link to all of them. Being a search-results page for “Cuzzillo,” it also includes a mention here and there of me. The list goes all the way back to 2007 and “Personal Data Warehouses: Challenging a Single Version of the Truth.” Back then, “single version” was still sacred.