Father of #MakeoverMonday Andy Kriebel chats to us about his past, present and upcoming visit to Ireland
Ahead of his upcoming visit to Dublin, Andy Kriebel chats to the Information Lab Ireland about data, Tableau, #MakeoverMonday and red carpets.
Hi Andy. Can we start with the basics? Tell us a bit about yourself.
I grew up in Philadelphia. I went to University in Florida and I studied Math there and then went on to Graduate School in North Carolina and I studied Math Sciences or Applied Math – basically solving physical real world problems. It was super nerdy.
Ok so how do we get from Applied Math to life with Tableau?
I went to live in North Carolina. We lived there for two years and I started out as an underwriter for an insurance company, that was kind of mathy I guess. We went then to Atlanta Georgia and I was working as a programmer before I got into project management. And I really liked that because it let me travel the world which was pretty cool and then I worked for Coca-Cola, left, came back to Coca-Cola and that’s when I started using Tableau, really by accident.
When you say by accident what do you mean exactly?
So in 2007, I was given a project to create some dashboards using data for some planning stuff we were doing and I couldn’t really do it in Excel. I had a look around and Tableau was the first thing that came up in my Google search and I had the whole thing done in thirty minutes. That was Version 3 or 4 think and I just found that we clicked.
It sounds like it was pretty much love at first sight
Since then there has been maybe nearly four-thousand days, I’ll bet you there hasn’t been a hundred days that I haven’t touched it.
Wow, that’s dedication.
I think it’s more addiction than dedication.
So how did you work it into your professional life?
So I got a new role in Coca-Cola where I got to use Tableau full-time, basically doing promotion analysis work and I was the first Tableau user there. It was around then that I started blogging.
Then Facebook asked me to come and run their Tableau practise and Data Visualisation so we were out in California for three years before moving to London.
How did the move to London happen?
My wife came with me to a Tableau conference in June 2014. I was invited to come and speak by a partner and on the way home she suggested the move to London. So I contacted Craig Bloodworth in The Information Lab UK. I had known Craig since 2010 and reached out to him and asked if he knew anyone who was hiring and he suggested I go and work with them. From there we came up with the idea of The Data School.
How?
It was really a combination of what I was passionate about and what Tom Brown and Craig felt the data market needed. So when I was at Facebook I used to travel the World training people in how to use Tableau and the market needed talent, people who had the skills. So those two things happened to come together at the right time. Tom saw that and that’s where the idea of The Data School came from.
So three years on from that conference, are you still happy there?
Oh yes very much. London is great. From a life perspective, we have so many cultural experiences yet to explore and really being in Europe offers us opportunities to learn about the world that we’d never have gotten in the States. In terms of The Data School, I love how I’ve been able to introduce so many new people to Tableau and Alteryx and see their passion flourish
Where did your idea for #MakeoverMonday come from?
I’d been doing makeovers on my blog since around 2009 but it wasn’t called #MakeoverMonday then. I’ve been doing it in it’s current form for about four years. Pretty much every week.
I have to say I’m a little bit in awe. It must take up so much of your time.
Not really. It’s no different than any other hobby people have. When you’re passionate about something you make time for it.
When did you notice that it was becoming quite big?
The idea of making a community project started last year. Andy Cotgreave (Big Book of Dashboards) had found that he wasn’t really using Tableau as much as he used to or wanted to and he wanted something that would give him a reason to use it again so he asked could he kind of tag along. From that we thought ‘why not just post the data sets to the community as well’. So I was kind of doing the leg work: creating the data sets, posting them on my blog and then Andy was working on the visualisations along with me and it became really good and we saw people began tweeting about it and became interested and started creating their own visualisations and posting them on Tableau Public and Twitter. Andy couldn’t continue this year so I asked Eva Murray to join me back in December, so it will be our anniversary soon.
Do you ever feel that Tableau has become such an art – like we see in #MakeoverMonday – that data or the information we are looking for is at risk of getting lost?
I do very few complicated things. I try to keep visualisations very simple and make it as easy for people to understand and that’s what I try to teach people in The Data School. We see that a little in #MakeoverMonday where people see it as a competition of sorts, especially now that we write weekly recaps and we highlight work that we like. But, you know, you’ll see very few fancy visualsations being highlighted. We prefer simplicity.
The whole point is to communicate the story with the data and if it looks great but doesn’t communicate anything is it really good? It might look good and you might put it on a poster but I certainly err more on the side of simplicity and communication than art.
But in saying that the great thing about #MakeoverMonday is that it is a platform for people to express their creativity and a lot of people use it as a place to try something new. They know that sometimes it doesn’t communicate well but it was fun to learn and we want to encourage that too. We don’t have a problem with that. It’s their prerogative, it’s their bio. You know in many ways Tableau Public has become the new CV so if people want have something like that on their CV absolutely do it.
Have you been to Ireland before?
Yes, I have been there quite a few times. I went there a lot when I worked for Facebook and actually was there the night they opened The Marker Hotel beside it. It was the first time I got to walk on a red carpet and Andy Williams was playing. It was fun.
Join us on Thursday September 14th for a very special Dublin Tableau User group workshop with Andy and Eva Murray.
And if that wasn’t enough, we have a great evening lined up. The Road to Sam, promises to be an entertaining preview of The All-Ireland final with All-Ireland winning Donegal footballer Eamon McGee and our very own Rob Carroll.
