But the biggest issue is still making sure that anyone who needs the right data, can actually find and access it. But more often than not, report nomenclature is extremely cryptic, making it hard for regular users to find the right one. Additionally users normally have a questions or intent that they start with and just find a grid of visualisations that forces them to translate their intent first. All this discourages many users from looking into the data in the first place, as the arduous work outweighs the advantages of looking into it.

This is why we are introducing Questions for Tableau. Questions is all about enabling business users to find the right answers for their questions FAST and EASY.

Questions is a brand new feature within Kiwi that lets you connect data-related questions to Tableau views and push them to Slack. This allows streamlining communication between BI and other teams; provide context and additional help for views and make the right data extremely easy to find.

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Enabling Discovery In order to leverage data in Tableau reports, users need to find and discover them first. Tableau is structured along projects and workbooks that often come with cryptic names making it counterintuitive for discovery especially when the number of views increases and Tableau is not used daily. Search-functionality hardly provides any help as you only search among cryptic workbook / sheet names.

Using Questions, the BI team can connect any number of reports to any data-related question and thus create a question-answer dynamic within Tableau. No more scrolling through cryptic names and thumbnails, but discovering relevant data using normal sentences!

Giving Context How often do BI teams look into workbooks and pondered: “Why was this created?” “What does this answer?” “Is this still relevant?” “Where does the data come from?“. This occurs so often, even though creating reports takes hours of work.

With Questions, BI teams can structure their reports along questions instead of cryptic names, add additional help and context information so it can be found faster and understood easier.

Centralising Metrics Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are the objective number that shows progress or stagnation. Without them, teams act blindly and unreflected. Having KPIs handy is not always easy, as they can live in different places under different names and sometimes need to be calculated first.

Using Questions with Tableau allows teams to centralise KPIs in Slack and have them, when they are needed.

No matter what use cases apply to your team’s situation, giving data good context that can be understood by anyone within the team is a big step forward for your business intelligence.

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Originally published at www.kiwimydata.com.

Both Tableau and Slack are unbelievably valuable tools for companies that decided to buy and implement them. So why not connect both to stimulate usage and maximise their value?

This is the underlying thinking of our new Kiwi BI Search update, the newest version of our Tableau-Slack client.

What you get with the new Kiwi BI Search:

• 🔍Search, preview and pull any Tableau report into Slack with advanced keyword search.
• 📊Filter views and dashboards directly within Slack to quickly get your desired data with Kiwi’s Tableau Live Filtering feature.
• 🎯Directly request any filtered view with one single text command with Direct Commands.

Here is what it looks like:

How it works

There are two ways to summon the Kiwi Slack client. Either by typing in ‘/kiwi’ or ‘/kiwi plus what you are looking for’. The first method activates a search bar with a dropdown menu showing all accessible Tableau views for the respective user.

The second method activates Kiwi and directly searches all Tableau views and filters using the keywords you’ve typed after the /kiwi command. Here’s a screenshot. Click here to see an annotated version that describes the preview list in detail.

You can then go straight to the Tableau view on Tableau with a provided link, load the unfiltered view or a filtered view. Afterwards you can further filter the views right within Slack and share the report with your team.

🚀 Want to join over 1,000 global companies and try Kiwi? Visit www.kiwimydata.com or save time and

Increasing the adoption of data intelligence has always been hard for business intelligence leaders. Especially getting users to adopt tools like Tableau, that offer such a wide range of features that have to be understood and learned, can be a challenge. With our new Kiwi features we support companies with exactly this challenge.

With Kiwi Smart BI Messaging we now offer a neat way to realise a conditional Tableau reporting process that automates the distribution of your Tableau reports. Anyone in your organisation can define important business metrics (KPIs) that are relevant for their work and then apply any type and number of data condition rule onto that KPI. When triggered, these rules refresh the right Tableau views and distribute them automatically to predefined people via Slack. Save time and only get alerted when metrics change that you truly care about.

Kiwi provides four different rule types you can apply on KPIs:

• Budget monitors notify you when you are about to miss a certain target budget within a defined time interval.
  (ex: marketing spend is at 80% of this months’ budget)
• Trend recognition keeps you informed when there is a pattern or tendency of change over a defined time interval.
  (ex: a signup drop of 5% for three days in a row)
• Threshold checks inform you whenever a KPI passes a predefined threshold.
  (ex: sales team “Foxtrot” just hit 100k revenue!)
• Outlier detection calculates the moving standard deviation and informs you when a KPI falls out of that range.
  (ex: CR dropped by 2.9% today, which is 42% outside the expected range)

When a rule is triggered, a message like this will be sent to the selected people or Slack channel(s):

The message can be a standalone alert or enriched with one or several Tableau views. With our Tableau Live Filtering feature, recipients can directly interact with the data without leaving Slack.

This is a great way to increase the adoption of Tableau and drive data-driven actions within your organisation. Not to mention the time your business intelligence team will save on automating these constantly recurring tasks.

Does that sound interesting? Kiwi Smart BI Messaging will roll out to every Kiwi user soon. If you can’t wait, sign up for our Early Access program! Just leave your details here and we will invite you. Thanks!

Define your most important business metrics, apply trigger rules and get data-driven notifications when relevant changes happen — directly into Slack!

You might already know Kiwi as the best way to get Tableau data into Slack. Hundreds of great companies use that integration on a daily basis. However, connecting Tableau and Slack is only the first step for us in reaching our goal to maximise data-driven actions in every organisation.

Today we are super excited to announce what we have been up to in the last months: Kiwi Smart BI Messaging. The first independent BI tool that works within and around Slack! With Kiwi you can increase data intelligence and drive data-based decisions within your company. Help your users cut through the noise and take data-driven action when it counts most.

This is how Kiwi Smart BI Messaging looks like

Things you can do with Smart BI Messaging

🔑 Define important metrics (KPIs) that are relevant for your work
Everyone has certain KPIs that trigger action in their day-to-day work. Monitor them automatically with Kiwi and discover what other KPIs are important to your team and colleagues.

📉 Set rules that trigger notifications
Always be on top of changes in your data! Set budgets, trends, thresholds and outlier rules for any KPI. You can also set schedulers to notify you at specific times and automatically attach Tableau views and dashboards.

⚡️ Get data-driven and actionable notifications right into Slack!
Always be on top of your data with Kiwi and update yourself, your entire team or specific colleagues as soon as relevant data changes happen. Receive insightful notifications to selected people or entire Slack channels.

👍 Collaborate around data and receive feedback from your team
Loop people in, add context to the data or simply let your team interact with it. Using Slack finally enables instant feedback loops to rapidly increase the intelligence of your organisation.

How does this sound? If you are interested in giving Kiwi a try, just leave your details in this Typeform and we will send you an invite to our Early Access Program!

We would love to hear your feedback and ideas. Leave your thoughts in the comment section or just drop us a line (khanh@kiwimydata.com)!

Thanks!

TL;DR We believe that business intelligence or the way you interact with data should be easier. Our tool achieves this by leveraging machine learning and conversational interfaces such as Slack. You can sign up for early access here:

Today, companies collect an ever increasing amount of data. Making decisions based on that data instead of gut feeling makes instinctive sense and is probably on every leaders’ agenda by now.

As Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape once quipped, “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

Most business intelligence companies out there claim that being data-driven is not about a few reports at the beginning of the day or week, but about giving decision makers the power to explore data independently. A true data-driven company allows every person who can use data to make better decisions, has access to the data when they need it.

We obviously agree with all that, but think that these kind of statements are so 2010. It’s no surprise that most BI tools out there have an user adoption rate that hovers around 20–25%. BI tools are usually neither intuitive nor efficient for the day-to-day use and thus will only be utilised “for the big decisions”. Or only by the quantitative analyst colleagues. It seemed crazy to us that despite all the talk of big data and data-driven cultures, the way how the regular folks within a company can interact with data has largely not evolved in decades.

In our personal lives software has delighted us in so many ways, but we are still dreaded by the ones we use at work. I rarely see people smile when they hear “Business Intelligence”.

Why? Other than consumer software, enterprise software companies try to force humans to adapt to their software, when instead, the software should adapt to humans. We think that is wrong. Enterprise software must adapt to the behaviours people are familiar with and enjoy. Not only does that make common sense, but also strong commercial sense, too. Or would any leader out there like to see only one fifth of their colleagues adopt that expensive software the company just bought?

There has to be a better way to arm modern organisations and digital workers with something to make their job easier. That brings us to our mission and what we are building with Kiwi.

At Kiwi, we believe that the future of business intelligence is easy and actually intelligent. Wow, that sounds like the most empty phrase you might think now. But bare with me here.

Almost none BI tool out there is easy. They introduce an interface to a worker’s life that she normally never ever encounters privately. They also interrupt most workflows and slow down decision making tremendously. Yes, the possibility to dive into huge datasets and explore your company’s data can be powerful; but for most people, especially in their day-to-day business, it is just simply overwhelming.

Almost none BI tool out there is intelligent. One might assume an innate “intelligence” in business intelligence, but to date BI just sits there like a piece of clay waiting for someone with the chops to make something out of it. If nobody with enough analytical thinking pulls out some insight of the company’s data, it basically has the same value as a piece of clay.

So how do we solve this? Messaging and Machine Learning.

We believe that messaging, or the conversational interface, will be the canonical standard UI for most software applications in the future. Not only does everyone know how messaging works and uses messaging apps tens if not hundred times a day, but messaging also just “feels” natural and easy. It also cuts away most constraints that come with modern design standards (think buttons, clicks, scrolls) and saves plenty of time. Whether it’s Slack, Stride or Teams, it is now a reality that messaging is permeating the workplace with such pace and intensity that its impact changes the way we work forever.

We wholeheartedly agree with what Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures wrote:

“At work, we’re thirsty for data to guide and inform decisions and we bring with us similar expectations of technology’s ability to answer questions instantly. As chat becomes an increasingly important user interface in the workplace, there’s a massive opportunity for startups to enrich conversations with answers to questions that pop-up in Slack and elsewhere.”

Furthermore, we believe that business intelligence should be actually intelligent. Today, we are able to achieve that with machine learning. There is actually no need to turn anyone and everyone into a data scientist and make her a quant to get insights out of data. With Kiwi we are able to intelligently understand what KPIs are important for whom, what has changed in the data that should be known and then shoot the right person a notification so she can act based on that.

These two components, messaging and machine learning, are the core of Kiwi. Kiwi makes it easy to use business intelligence in your job and helps you intelligently monitor the most important KPIs automatically. And over time and with higher adoption Kiwi will evolve and become smarter. And someday it will be your data buddy.

For those of you who are excited about Kiwi and believe in our mission, we would love to hear from you! And if you are interested in giving Kiwi a try, sign up for the Early Access program!

Plus a cool way to teach it to your colleagues

Data fans rejoice! Today we are excited to announce Tableau Live Filters for Slack! Live Filters are an exceptionally easy way to filter Tableau Dashboards and Views directly within Slack.

After selecting the view you want to push to Slack, you can apply filters via our Kiwi Slack App and get the desired filtered view within seconds.

No matter how fast-paced the decision at hand, teams can now get a data perspective on the situation without having to hop back and forth between the discussion and Tableau.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! After requesting the desired view and filters, we provide a magic Kiwi command for you to share, save or memorise (if you are one of those who fancy that). Enter the command anywhere in Slack and you can get the exact view and filters as last time.

This is also a helpful feature if anyone requires a specific view on a regular basis and you want to save both of you time.

Just let them save the command somewhere and they can request the view themselves in the future within seconds. Just like the old proverb goes:

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Want to give it a try?

If you’ve already signed up with us and added Kiwi to your Slack, you already know that you can access a set of demo data. Here’s a command to request one of those views, just punch it into Slack and play around with the filters!:

/kiwi view Superstore/Performance

Haven’t signed up yet? Why not? Get a free trial and find out how you can make fast decisions based on data. Or make it quick and just

Thank you :)

Already a Kiwi user? Here’s how to setup Live Filters for your data.