HESTA, the industry superannuation fund for health and community services, is expanding access to analytics and insights by enabling staff to interact with data via Slack.
(L-R) Sascha Ambrose (Tableau) and Benjamin Warren (HESTA).
General manager of empowered intelligence Benjamin Warren told a Salesforce Agentforce World tour event in Melbourne that the fund is using Tableau Pulse with a Slack integration to encourage more business users to work in more data-driven ways.
Warren said that surfacing high-level insights through Slack made sense because enterprise chat is “where people are and where the conversations are happening.”
“We augment the conversations with data and insights,” he said.
Tableau Pulse differs from traditional Tableau in that it is geared towards business users, not analysts or other more traditionally data-minded users.
The combination of Tableau Pulse and Slack enabled HESTA to move beyond an internal “plateau in terms of adoption” of data analytics.
“We had people who were doing the analytical work, but as the organisation continued to scale, we were not continuing to grow the analytical capability across the organisation. It was really tied to people who had ‘analyst’ or ‘engineer’ or ‘scientist’ in their job role,” Warren said.
“We’re looking to activate people who would not typically do analytical work by bringing analytical tools into their workflow.”
Warren said that HESTA had observed a “10x-plus increase in the number of questions asked and answered in our Slack channels that are analytics-based”.
“All of that happening in Slack, linking off to Tableau,” he said.
The main use case for querying Tableau Pulse is to “provide the organisation [with] a really quick and easy way to get to what is the number; how is it changing and why.”
“That’s a simple workload that an analyst is comfortable with, but the segment of people who are not analysts really struggle with,” Warren said.
He added that traditional Tableau dashboards still exist in the organisation but were geared towards a distinct set of users.
“We haven’t done away with dashboards – we still have them, but they serve a completely different part of the organisation.
“They serve the people who are more analytically minded who want to dig into and understand the why.”
