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.’”

One of the pleas in Mark Madsen’s fascinating keynote at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas was to let the “Barts” work. The Barts are, of course, the Bart Simpsons among us, the sometimes nerdy rebels who actually come up with interesting analyses and other useful things.

When the lights went up, a “Bart” was right nearby me at the big round table. Though he “loved” Mark’s salute to his work, consultant Rick Paul wanted more.

As a Bart, he works with a lot of “Marges” and “Homers.” In Mark’s model, the Homers are the everyday business intelligence consumers, about 80 percent of most work groups. The Marges are about 18 percent, and they actually think a little. The last 2 percent are the Barts, the ones who analyze and invent — and who’re limited by the BI systems built for Marge and Homer.

The more painful obstacle facing many Barts, says Rick, isn’t about any technology.

He tells how his team started with three people, all data architects, all smart. “We could do anything,” he recalls. Now the team has 120 members, many of them Homers. They’re of the 80 percent who consume but don’t invent or even think very much. “They’ll fake inability,” he says, “to tempt or coerce the three innovators to do their work. They say, ‘Oh, you’re so good at this. It’ll just take you a few minutes to do this.’” It really does take only a few minutes, but “it’s not thinking work.”

“I’m lazy,” he says, “but when I don’t want to do something, I figure out how to automate it.”

Rick says he’s still trying to figure out how this situation can be resolved. He mentions isolation, but he also thinks of encouraging the 80 Percenters to have some vision for their own careers. They should have some way to “add intelligence to their own work on a daily basis. They should be actively engaged with their work.”

Smaller teams might also work, he says. In a team of 120, it’s easy enough to do nothing for weeks at a time. It’s much harder in a team of, say, seven members.

“The innovators have to be positioned to influence the company,” he says, “but not be abused.”

When some people look at dashboards, they want to see patterns but not reasons. “They don’t want to read the fine print,” said one attendee in Lyndsay Wise’s dashboards seminar at Enterprise Data World in San Francisco yesterday. That’s what the man learned in one data-quality project for a human resources department.

He was frank enough to call drill-down “the fine print” — the suggestion that the “why?” is just noise. He slipped out before I could find out more.

Had his complacent users been victims of abusive parents or bad teachers? I’ve worked with such users. I trust them, I like them, and most businesses couldn’t do without them. But I’m curious about their incuriousness, as some of them might wonder about me.

There’s too much data, we know that. Tom Davenport ponders the overwhelmingness of it all today. The Economist reported on it last month, and Neil Raden wrote about it 15 years ago. The casual users feel it more and more.

For the overwhelmed, there’s the palliative dashboard. It works the way Mozart does for who can’t tell Mozart from Schmozart: knowing it’s Mozart makes them feel good. The palliative dashboard can be contrary to every best practice we know of and still succeed.

One person in the audience told about a pre-dashboard-era CEO who prided himself on having no high school degree. He wanted yesterday’s sales figures on his desk at 8 a.m. every morning. What decisions did he make based on that data? None! It just made him feel good, someone discovered later. Even without his reading glasses on, the patterns on the paper must have looked nice against the wood grain on the desk.

Attention dashboard makers: mind the furniture.

Dan Murray’s taking on Big BI — and in just under two weeks at the Tableau Customer Conference in Seattle, he’s going to explain his four steps to rebellion — that is, “a high value, low cost BI reporting system.”

Dan devised the system when the company he worked for — which had revenue of about $70 million — couldn’t afford solutions from Big BI vendors. Bids ranged from $130,000 to $580,000.

Dan built his own with Tableau and Excel. The final cost, he writes, was $40,000 — $8000 for Tableau Desktop Pro and the rest for the database and ETL logic.

“I’m on a mission to spread this around the country,” he writes in email. “I consider to be every bit as big a revolution in data as the spreadsheet was to accountants in 1982. It’s thrilling.”