Visionary at Work
Information Management Magazine, February 2007
Pat Hanrahan,
CTO and co-founder of Tableau Software
Tableau Software CTO Pat Hanrahan brings freewheeling creativity to the staid world of interpreting data.
Seattle's Fremont neighborhood is a known haven for creative eccentrics; it is a place where the official motto is "Delibertus Quirkus" ("Freedom to be Peculiar"). It's not a place you'd expect to find a buttoned- down business software developer. True to form, the 30 employees at tiny Tableau Software earn their keep in Seattle's self-proclaimed "Center of the Universe" with high-end resumes that somehow cross Hollywood with Wall Street. Advanced-degree Stanford alums are the core of Tableau, counting CEO Christian Chabot, who arrived from Mobius Capital Ventures, and five Ph.D.s, including Director Jock Mackinlay, who is credited with coining the term "information visualization." CTO and co-founder Pat Hanrahan keeps a pair of Academy Awards on his mantle from his old job as chief architect of Pixar's RenderMan software, (since employed in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and many more blockbusters). Hanrahan's work at Pixar in the 1990s actually preceded his Princeton and Stanford Ph.D. degrees, where biophysics and parasitic nematodes were heavily involved. Cut to the chase and you realize that talking to Pat Hanrahan is not your usual software exec interview, as DM Review Editorial Director Jim Ericson recently found out.
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DMR: How does a successful creative fellow like you wind up in business software?
Pat Hanrahan: The two great uses of graphics are for entertainment and art and for informative purposes. I figured we had done a lot of great work in entertainment, but I didn't think graphics had been used effectively to help people do their work. If you buy a new PC, it has an incredible graphics chip built in, and the only time anybody uses that technology is for playing games. Business applications are not really taking advantage of the technology. Thinking about that sort of led to Tableau, understanding how graphics convey information and support reasoning.
DMR: It still sounds a bit gimmicky for corporate technology.
PH: In movies and entertainment, graphics are designed to tell stories. That's a little different than helping people reason. But there are similarities - you have to know what problem you're trying to solve. One reason Pixar has done so well is that they don't just make grand special effects; they really know how to tell stories with the technology. When we started this research effort, we were interested in learning about how people use graphics to digest information. I worked with several psychologists, talked to a lot of graphic designers and then my friend [VP and co-founder] Chris Stolte decided to do a thesis on this topic. He and I invented a system for building informative, useful graphics. And that's what became VizQL.
DMR: I think a lot of people have heard about VizQL but don't understand what's so different about it.
PH: The model that people have used forever is to do analysis with calculators, spreadsheets or some kind of computer interface in rows and columns of text and numbers. Once you're happy with the numbers, you run a charting wizard that gives you three or four choices of templates - pie charts, line charts or bar charts - you make your choice, create your picture and off you go. In VizQL there are no charting wizards, templates or frames. When people ask how many charts our product can build, we ask them, "How many questions can you ask? How many calculations can you conceive?" What VizQL lets you do all at once is describe a picture, query the database and perform all the analytical calculations you need to create the picture you want. The engine takes you through cycles of analysis, which means that as you pose questions, you do simple things like drag new fields into the user interface. You get an answer, and then you ask another question. You almost never think you're using graphics; you're just asking questions, and the engine underneath makes it work by putting process to visual analysis. I should add that when we originally came up with this we didn't know a lot about business intelligence [BI] - Chris and I were computer scientists. Fortunately we met up with Christian Chabot, who had a lot of experience as an analyst and knew a lot about the field. He immediately understood how this technology could be incorporated into BI products, and that's when we launched Tableau.
DMR: So it's really like learning a new semantic language and iterative process of thinking.
PH: Exactly. People have studied graphics as a language, and that's our approach when we design. The key thing is to pay attention to how graphics communicate information and encode the information in the form that's most effective. You compose an expression in the interface on the fly, and when you add or subtract something, you modify the expression. In our system, we consider text tables a special case. Text tables make sense if you want to look up something in a table. If you want to look at outliers, a text table is slow and ineffective. So depending on the task you do, there's a particular way of representing the information so that the task is most efficient. It's very different than the traditional data visualization approach to the problem.
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