cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology

The short answer, as you know, is that it's impossible to tell you how to be insightful and imaginative in a single blog post. All I can do is point you in the general direction, and (hopefully) ignite a little spark.

What's the Goal? and, Where to Begin?

I previously talked about the growing calls for effective data visualizations; we have access to all this great information, and there are insights in there somewhere - but we need just the right point of view to rise above the cloud of data and see the real opportunity. It helps if you have experienced that rush of insight when looking at a particularly impactful graphic; not just a good looking slide, it calls out something important in a particularly effective way. Haven't we all watched that earnest TV lawyer pull the winning argument out of the blue [right before the final commercial break] and win the big case?

Of course, it's not enough just to want it - you have to have a little reverse-engineering in your soul. You need confidence & bravado (I can and should be able to create those killer pictures), hunger & curiosity (how did they do that?), and confidence to know that you can - with a little hacking. It also helps to have the blissful ignorance to assume that it's within your technical grasp.

Step 1: Find Someone who Knows - and Follow them Around!

I'm a big fan of the "follow him around" method for learning new technology - not classroom instruction, more like a series of specific examples of applied technology. I had seen plenty of examples of presentations that I thought were very effective, but I didn't understand what was happening, what exactly was making them so effective. I had to find someone that could talk about putting together effective presentations - and had the good fortune to attend a seminar by Edward Tufte. Sure, you get some nice books, great to page through - but like most technical manuals, they don't really make sense until you've watched Tufte deconstruct the graphics. I learned the importance of taking extraneous ink off the page, and how scale, color and shape can illustrate and/or obfuscate. I didn't walk away from that experience with specific skills as much as clarified ideas - and a hunger and curiosity for more.

Step 2: Find Lots of Examples - and Steal some Inspiration!

Over the past few months, I've been following a number of blogs dedicated to ideas around information visualization - more skilled practitioners to follow around! The links below to take you to particularly interesting examples; your task is to subscribe to them all and regularly scan for ideas ...

Information is Beautiful

• Great Visualizers: Mike Deal charts The Beatles - I don't know exactly what that graphic is that shows the keys of Beatles tunes, but it looks cool - I want to figure out what it's showing, and how to build one

Cool Infographics

• The Caffeine Poster, How Much Caffeine Are You Drinking? Made all the more interesting by this follow-on post, The Making of The Caffeine Poster
• 16 Infographic Resumes, A Visual Trend Resumes done in graphics? Well, maybe not for me, but these are great examples of packing a lot of information in a small area - and, making the message stand out in the crowd!
• Pink Floyd Timeline of Band Members
  

Flowing Data

• 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide It's not always about examples of applied data visualization - there are plenty of mini-tutorials gettin published, like this one
  

EagerEyes.org

• Understanding Pie Charts Another techniques post, this one deconstructing peie charts. I never knew why I wasn't a big fan of the pie, but this article points out a lot of stuff that's pretty obvious (now that you mention it ...)
  

Chart Porn

• Haiti This blog is just a non-stop source of interesting examples
  

New York Times

• Another common source of terrific information visualizations is the New York Times - many folks blog about the most effective examples, even our friends at Ask ET
  

Step 3: Get Your Coding Hands Dirty!

Remember, after you are done being wowed by the presentation - figure out how you could build one.

• The old stalwart Excel comes with an ever growing list of graph types. Can't find the one you want? Try to hack at the standard stuff using VBA!
• Sometimes a blog post will point you to some utilities. No, I never heard of Gource, but you can bet I'm looking for a project to use it with!
• Open source has a lot of interesting tools out there - from jQuery addins to full-blown BI suites - lots of tools to load up with your data.
  

Remember - get inspired, find some starting points, and get building! the only way to really understand how to create insightful, impactful visualizations is to do a lot of experimentation.

Previously ...

• Stretching Your User Interface Design Muscles (April 16, 2008)
• Data Visualization: 'Life' of Open Source Projects (June 16, 2008)
• Another Take on Enterprise Open Source (February 18, 2009)
• Practical Innovation Lessons from Software Vendor R&D (April 16, 2009)
• A Company is like a Sphere (September 15, 2009)
• Why Corporate IT Fails when Competing with Consumer Tech ... and How to Change the Game (January 5, 2010)

Technorati Tags: data visualization, design, development, hands on, innovation, presentations

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan,

Between business requests and breathless vendors, I am getting caught up in the growing tide of interest in "data visualizations" - managers requesting highly interactive, highly graphical, highly intuitive analytics interfaces (think Minority Report). But what are we trying to accomplish here? We keep on hearing about "executive dashboards", a heads-up display of in-my-face KPIs, or statistics and exceptions delivered automatically to my e-mail and/or Blackberry. However, when I ask management folks to get a bit more specific - how would you actually use this information? Is there an interest in doing the drill down, the click through, the hand waving? Not so much - basically, I've heard that folks are satisfied with what they have (ex. daily sales reports or customer service metrics), and are not necessarily interested in micromanaging through their staffs (by drilling down through graphical views on their desktop).

The real interest is in giving the right "stuff" to middle management and team leaders ...

1. Data Sets - access to transactional data in enough detail to permit mixing, matching, slicing, and dicing, to identify and target hidden opportunities for business value (growth and/or savings)
2. Data Access Tools that provides fast and flexible manipulation of the figures
3. New and different Data Visualizations to enable insight and help target opportunities

... and we can iterate on these already:

• The first item - access to data - is getting easier over time. Projects like data warehousing and ERP implementations have taught companies the value of clean transaction data and correct & complete master data. We are also expanding the number of folks that know how to do basic query and extract operations, from all sorts of transaction systems (on premise and in the cloud), into data sets that can be manipulated off-line.
• Next - most folks can and should be happy with Excel and pivot tables - especially with the improvements in Office 2007 and beyond. It's becoming easier to specify filters, cross tabs, and aggregate operations, and Excel can also handle reasonably large data sets - tens of thousands of rows.

We are certainly not "finished" with #1 and #2 - still plenty of work to do in terms of data cleansing, data access and basic manipulation. However, the biggest opportunities for improvement in 2010 are in the area of visualizations - new and different ways to display multidimensional data.

Here's a simple example of profitability analysis using a visualization that is not available in Excel:

Click on the picture for a full-size image!

This type of graph is called a tree map or heat map. It's a basic query - show gross sales by customer for a number of product families, but this clever picture shows a number of things in a two dimensional view:

• Area in the graph represents sales - represented in dollars
• White borders denote product families - like Cookies, Diet Snacks, and Organic Food
• Red borders carve out specific customers
• Color represents degree of profitability - the most profitable are bright green, and the least profitable are bright red.

With a quick explanation of what you are looking at, targets of opportunity jump out at you - go for the big red boxes (like C) to cut the non-profitable stuff, or the really green boxes (like A) to sell more of the really profitable stuff. You can also get a bit more imaginative, looking for the right blend of size and shade to find customers "on the edge" of going really green (how can we make B as green as their neighbor, A)?

Creating Opportunities for Insight - Playing with Visualizations

To really get at #3, we may need better tools, but we also need some new and different communication design ideas. What types of data visualization are possible, given the dimensions of the data we have? Which visualizations might lead to some interesting insights? Or, take the opposite view - given a particular data set, what truths are in there, and how might we draw a picture of that (to clearly illustrate these truths for the interested observer)?

Clearly, there is no cookbook approach to something like this. It takes a certain amount of insight and imagination, and that is a critical skill combination that most IT departments, by nature, simply do not have. IT and Finance are two areas where structure and process typically trump design sensibilities.

No, I'm not saying that there is no artistic ability anywhere in IT; it just doesn't come out very often as we labor away on our project deliverables. As previously noted, corporate IT is typically not rewarded for design - just results (done = good, "good" = meh).

I don't think that the business is asking for fancy tools as much as creativity and new ideas for ways to represent business questions and answers. Instead of the same old bar charts and tables of color-coded numbers - is there a better way to visualize this data to facilitate insights?

Next … sources of inspiration ...

Previously ...

• Stretching Your User Interface Design Muscles (April 16, 2008)
• There ain't much IT in IT Management (May 7, 2008)
• Data Visualization: 'Life' of Open Source Projects (June 16, 2008)
• Excel 2007 is a BOB system (Bag'O'Bugs) (October 5, 2008)
• Hacking the Google Chart API from Excel (January 17, 2009)
• Practical Innovation Lessons from Software Vendor R&D (April 16, 2009)
• Who owns Master Data in your company? (May 30, 2009)

Technorati Tags: data visualization, innovation, presentations

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan