We are using Tableau as the BI backbone for our groups. Though mainly used by our sales organization to help them see into their customer segments, geography, and customer buying patterns, it is also used to aggregate that data up to the management decision makers as well. We have external stakeholders who rely on that information as well.
Pros
Data visualization is bar none the best feature on Tableau.
The ability to drag and drop and ease of use to slice the data into different views.
Being a dashboard tool in a more intuitive and more stable than an Excel based dashboard.
Cons
While user intuitive, that is really only true for those with data analysis and BI experience. This is still a tool for experienced data crunchers and not something I would unleash to many in my organization.
Still requires business intelligence consumers to be specific in their requests for data in dashboards, so it still requires the touch point between the data and the user, it requires someone with some know-how, to be in the middle. So it is still not democratizing our organizational data.
Likelihood to Recommend
You need to have enough data to make sense. The value really comes when you add unstructured data so if you are using structured data only from a single system or you have a holistic system the cost may not be justified. However if your holistic system has a poor dashboarding system or their third party add-on for BI is cost prohibitive for your user base, tableau is a great choice to augment your existing systems.
