Visualizations

Data Visualization: How (2 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 19, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

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 Visualization: Why (1 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 13, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

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, [...]

Hacking the Google Chart API from Excel

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 18, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

a bit of code on a Saturday night …I’ve written before about a simple way to measure and report IT value to the business – quantifying alignment with strategic initiatives project spend in context. It all culminated with a single, simple slide – numbers, with some Tufte-esque Sparklines thrown in. Click on the picture for [...]

Zodiac of Knowledge Capture

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 16, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

The start of a new year gives me a rare chance to measure my knowledge capture output over time. I maintain electronic journals for the various projects I am driving, business units and functional areas I support, and people I work with. This results in a hundred or so separate MS Word documents, with generally [...]

Inspiration, Images, Insight, Imitation, Innovation

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 19, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Just a quick post on this pre-holiday weekend, with my design-leaning kids out of school / back from college for the holidays, and a general sense of creativity mixed in with the holiday spirit. Inspiration …… can come from many places. Nothing new there, but I like to get inspiration for X from looking at [...]

Linkfest: Data Visualization

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ September 7, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I’m a long-time fan of effective visualizations, and I’ve often written about the effective use of visual information when making presentations or communicating complex information. I’ve subscribed to my share of blogs and feeds on the topic, and have amassed quite a backlog of interesting links … presented here for your hyperlinking enjoyment …
Best Blogs
information [...]

Data Visualization: ‘Life’ of Open Source Projects

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 16, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Part of the “art” of communicating IT and business abstractions – technical challenges, project roadmaps, budget performance, customer relationships, IT effectiveness – is landing on the right visualization. A picture tells a thousand words, and if you can draw the picture well, your target audience will grasp these concepts quickly, and (potentially) get insights that [...]