Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcasted from the 2013 Tableau Customer Conference in Washington DC, talking to Sarah Nell, Global Corporate Account Analyst with Manpower.

Historically, Manpower has been known as a staffing firm, but since the economy changed in 2009, they shifted their approach, becoming more HR-driven. One of their major components is outsourcing the HR department. Coming out of the downturn, the Analytics practice at Manpower started in 2010. The driver was data. “We didn’t really look at data at that point, as a company,” admitted Nell. “We were always a sales organization.”

How data changed a company’s direction

“What kind of data feeds the process of transitioning from an anecdotal storytelling company to a data-crunching company?” asked Vellante. “The data is every person we’ve placed in a job,” Nell answered. “We’re talking about 400,000 people who are on assignment at any given time.”

The people are the data, and Sarah Nell was brought in to develop a kind of metric around those people. The most important metric is “how long are they on assignment and when they are not, WHY they are no longer on assignment,” she explains.  In today’s economy, it’s essential to retain people as much as possible, so, knowing why they’re leaving elsewhere might help remedy that brainpower loss.

When the data analytics group was formed, it was basically a team of five people for the entire organization, and they were pretty clueless, laughed Nell. “It was a question of low hanging fruit – what part of the company we could impact the most. So it led to our customer facing reporting. As for data sources, we were using Oracle Data Warehouse with a Cognos platform on top.”

Sarah Nell’s responsibility means translating the IT capabilities into the business needs of the company. It’s where Analytics sits today within the company. “It was a learning curve for all of us,” said Nell, admitting things were not always as smooth between the various departments of the company.

Tableau community

After discovering Tableau, things got easier, but not immediately. “If it were not for the community that exists around Tableau I would probably not know half the stuff I know today,” said Nell.

Finding out that they are a client of Tableau Online, Vellante wanted to know why they chose the SaaS version of the product, instead of the server-side option. “We wanted to make it accessible and interactive,” answered Sarah Nell, who found Tableau Online a natural fit for her needs.

“One of the pitfalls of working with data is over-complicating it. My mantra is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid… You want the data to be elegant, clean and simple. There’s beauty in it. That’s why Tableau does it so well: it’s clean, it’s simple, it’s attractive. You want to look at it and you want to play with it,” said Nell.

Keeping it simple implies “knowing you data, and your industry,” Nell concluded.  If practitioners don’t know their data, they tend to over-complicate things.