cazh1 » Inspiration

Art and Science of Data Visualization

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:02:45 +0000

“Data Visualization” has been an extremely active and popular topic for a few years – we can use Google’s Timeline search feature to see the growth in interest since 1980:

Google Timeline results for

That local high in July of this year was due in no small part to David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful talk at TED this past summer. It appeared in my RSS stream here, here, and here, so I got the hint, spent 18 minutes watching it, and got suitably jazzed on the power and potential of visualizations.

McCandless uses a variety of visualization techniques to generate insight into a wide range of topics ..

Mountains out of Molehills – what are we afraid of? Funny stuff, but hidden patterns that jump out at you with just a little extra context.
Facebook break-ups – at 6:15, the roller-coaster graph of predictable relationship demise, recently Slashdotted
Military Budgets – a digression into the knack we all have of misunderstanding / misrepresenting that facts via statistics. Did you know that Myanmar is the world’s biggest war machine (as a percent of GDP)?

An important section comes when McCandless talks about the start of his work in design of data visualizations. Note that he’s not had any formal training – it was just sort of dormant within – and is very probably there within all of us, practically forced on us with the information overload of the web-enabled era. The bulk of your sensory input is visual, and the majority of our perception is happening unconsciously.

… the eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns and variations … [it's] the Language of the Eye. And if you combine the Language of the Eye with the Language of the Mind – which is about words and numbers and concepts – you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other …

I do agree with his point that an effective visualization is self-evident, and appreciated by many – but I do not think it’s easy for the average Data Consumer to see themselves as a Data Artist, one who can conjure the magic on command. I have noticed that most of the data visualizations catching the public’s eye are not the ones you can easily generate with Excel (data navigation and manipulation tool for the masses). McCandless’ “balloon race” interactive diagram of health supplements is sublimely useful, easy to understand – and beyond the tool- and skill-sets of most of us.

Nevertheless – the inspiration, the examples, and tools are out there, and I am convinced that there are more Data Artists among us – they just don’t know it yet. I’m starting a series of posts today – I’ve been following many blogs and writing about this topic for some time – but it’s been a few months, and I’ve got a big backlog of topics to cover.

So check out the McCandless video; be prepared to get psyched, and then carve out some time to join me in this review. Data is the new soil, as McCandless points out – and just like good writing, those who can effectively help other visualize data and have their own insights will harvest some interesting insights, for themselves and their employers.

(… and learn how the Eyjafjallajokull volcano was carbon-neutral!)

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: Art, cognitive science, communicating complexity, data visualization, David McCandless, Design, Facebook, Google, hidden patterns, information overload, Inspiration, multi-media information sharing, Presentations, Science, TED, video, visual, visualization, visualization techniques

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Design Thinking and Process – Is It In You? (1 of 2)

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 03:25:08 +0000

Continuing a bit on my recent Design meme; I talk about the current relevance of design thinking, and the impact it can have on change management – but if it feels a bit foreign, how can you tell if you have it in you?

Do You Think Visually?

Interesting how Design always seems to have a strong visual component, even though functional design (like my data warehouse or the structure of my house) is not directly visible. Still, I thought Chuck Frey‘s post from last February is an interesting 10-part test, looking for some hints of visual thinkers. If you think beyond the simple yes-and-no questions, your feelings and interests in these areas could indicate latent design tendencies …

In the last month, have you drawn a diagram to explain something to someone?
In the last week have you drawn a diagram to help yourself understand or remember something?
Have you visited two or more art galleries or museums in the last 6 months?
Do you like to study maps of places before you visit them?
Can you visualize what a landscape might be like by looking at the contour lines on a map?
Did you like geometry at school?
Do you enjoy manipulating your digital photographs? For example, do you crop and edit them to improve the images?
Can you use the 2D engineering drawings of an object or the 2D architectural plans for a building to visualize what the object or building might look like?
Have you worked on a jigsaw puzzle in the last year?
Do you use mind maps to record and remember things?

Can You Appreciate Good Design When You See It?

From the always excellent FlowingData, an introduction to the talents of Cristobal Vila, who created this tremendous, design-sensitive walkthrough of Frank Lloyd Wrights FallingWater …

… and, if you like to see mathematics in nature, this little number (sic)

… I think should appeal to the techie/ programmer in you – the hidden order in the chaos of nature.

Need to Get some Peer Feedback?

Brian Hoff‘s site, The Design Cubicle is a terrific source for design ideas and thinking – and this past spring, pointed me to the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) site, which has started an area on their site where young designers are offering up advice for their peers, “seeking to develop a competitive advantage in the workplace”. Articles like Follow your passion and be the best at your craft, See no boundaries, and Work smart and prepare for a changing practice are good food for thought for any age.

Suspend your disbelief for just a moment, and explore a bit of your Design side. It can free up your thinking as you design systems, reports, transactions …

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Post tags: AIGA, American Institute of Graphic Arts, architecture, Brian Hoff, Chuck Frey, Cristobal Vila, Design, effective design, FallingWater, functional design, geometry, imagination, innovation, Inspiration, mind map, The Design Cubicle, video, visual, YouTube

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It’s Design, not Decorating

Jim MacLennan — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 02:14:09 +0000

Click to enlarge ...

A few months ago, I read Dan Pink‘s book, A Whole New Mind. Excellent stuff, with echoes in his video What Really Motivates Us? (check it out here), and it introduced me to the idea of “right mind thinking”. I’ve had a great respect for and interest in Architecture over the years, and have watched with great fascination (and a bit of jealousy) as my daughter progresses through her Interior Design studies at the University of Cincinnati (she’s the quote source for this post’s title, the designer of this blog’s logo, and I’ve even ripped a bit of one of her studio projects for an illustration).

As I read, watch, and listen as Erin talks about her passion and her projects, I’m also making connections to my professional experience and philosophies; it’s easy to write documents, develop applications, and create presentations, but it’s difficult (yet very impactful) to incorporate effective design into the finished product. However, much like Dan Pink’s observations on Abundance and the elevation of R-Directed Thinking, I see corporate IT groups feeling pressure to deliver technology that is fast and friendly like consumer tech, even though this is fundamentally in opposition to legacy corporate IT thinking.

Interior Design starts with a blank space, and figures out how to lay everything out to accomplish the objectives – living and working, following building codes and regulations, taking advantage of energy savings, etc. Easily said, but difficult to master; in IT, “design” is one of those annoying disciplines where written specifications are vague and problematic, merely acceptable results are faintly grating, and the best stuff is defined as “you’ll know it when you see it”.

This is not where IT likes to play – yet the same concepts apply to the design of compelling, impactful data visualizations, reports, web sites, etc. Are you taking a basic form layout and augmenting with the latest gadgets? Or are you mindfully thinking about layout of page, screen, data, and ink?

Design and IT

More to follow – I have a backlog of recommended reading and thought-provoking videos to pass along, courtesy of my RSS reader. But if this topic piques your interest, the best place to start is Dan Pink’s book – a quick read, and maybe the start of a fundamental change in your outlook.

That and a trip to the DAAP School of Design – ask for Erin, and prepare to be amazed.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments |
Post tags: A Whole New Mind, architecture, Art, Bearcats, DAAP, Dan Pink, Design, effective design, Inspiration, studio projects, University of Cincinnati

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The Sandpit

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:24:05 +0000

(via GNC, thanks for this one!)

A bit of artistic inspiration; a visually stunning film, combining time-lapse and tilt-shift photography.

Click the picture to see the video ...

For the intellectually and technically curious – more information here.
For the artist and the observationally curious – tai chi under the freeway? Nice.

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Post tags: Art, cityscape, Inspiration, tilt-shift, time lapse, urban, video

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Managing Change: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:41:00 +0000

Often, when trying to figure out how to “make things happen”, your focus switches between multiple targets. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And How can I get the others to understand what I am doing? Real change happens along a continuum that stretches from The Big Idea to Real Results, and people / organizations that want to make real change happen need to understand the different elements along the way.

Yes, I know – earlier, I suggested that one should pick a specific area (people, process, or technology) to develop real skills in. Still true, but what about those who aspire to leadership, who want to make change happen across the organization? A single person doesn’t need to be expert in each of these areas – but leaders should actively work in all of them. Aspire to be a jack of all trades, a master of none; the ability to develop a vision, communicate it with impact, build something actionable, and follow through with the implementation are bankable skills that effective, impactful leaders need.

For each of these “elements”, think of about their definition – but also think of them in context with the other elements of the continuum. A leader with an impractical vision is just a dreamer; breakthrough science that is not well communicated will just sit on the shelf.

Inspiration

Defined: The ability to imagine what is possible (aka Vision). This doesn’t have to be something as earth-shattering as Avatar or the next iPad – businesses are crying out for “innovation” (sorry for the buzzword) in areas as mundane as cost controls, Lean, and revenue growth. Make no small plans, but have the courage and the energy to stretch. Recognize the organization’s practical limits – but don’t sell them short, they might surprise themselves (and you!)

In Context: There is a fine line between imagination and inspiration; we need something that can be implemented in our lifetime. Flights of fancy can broaden your horizons, but you must eventually deliver real business results. This is where you can enable acceptance of the 80/20 rule – a practical vision that sees when enough is enough, that knows when to trim down the requirements to get 80% of the value with only 20% of the effort.

Art

Defined: Change often involves ideas, processes, or relationships that are difficult to understand, simply because they involve remixing the As-is with Something New, to create the Could Be. Sometimes it involves visualization – understanding a new structure, a changed process flow, or a hidden trend in the numbers. Sometimes it involves vocalization – an explanation or observation that needs just the right written or spoken words to trigger understanding and acceptance.

In Context: As goods and services are commoditized, and descriptive data becomes freely available in deep detail, the value and importance of design continues to grow. Well designed and executed words, pictures, sounds, thoughts, and ideas are the competitive differentiators that businesses always look for. Great leaders may possess acute verbal and/or visual communication skills, but don’t discount your abilities or overestimate the pizazz required to make change happen in your organization. Just invest time on a regular basis, thinking about the design of things you see and hear every day. What images capture you eyes and your imagination? How do some texts convey meaning without boring you to tears?

Science

Defined: Sooner or later, you will have to create something that doesn’t exist – a new tool, a simplified process, an effective data visualization, a useful report. This will always involve some specific “science” – knowledge of a programming language, a drawing tool, a data query, a report writer. At one point or another, sustainable change must manifest itself as a repeatable, measurable process or event – and sooner or later, you have to be able to translate your hand-waving to something that actually works.

In Context: Inspirational ideas need to find their way to the screen or the printed page, so they can be communicated [effectively], and communicated again [consistently]. The best design ideas need to manifest in the final product. And the best ideas must bridge from the tip of the pencil to something (a program? a web site? a document? a project plan?) that can be executed. The best leaders can still summon hands-on skills when needed; if you are in IT, have you built something interesting in the past few months?

Execution

Defined: The classic “rubber hits the road” – results derive from making something happen. This could be the execution of a process, but can also refer to the coordinated steps in a project plan that implements a new system, or establishing rules, structure, and predictability where previously there was random action. Science has created something, now it’s time to get it implemented – and, to make sure the promised results are delivered.

In Context: Starting a new process, stopping an old process, and bringing structure where there is disorder are the typical end results of most business projects, the ways that enterprises create value. However, inertia and entropy are powerful natural forces, and blasting through resistance (this is the way we’ve always done it …) often relies on a strong idea, communicated effectively and designed efficiently.

Master of None

I think the toughest challenge for some entrepreneurs is to know when to call for assistance. There is value in knowing everything about a single area (the biggest vision! the best programmer!), but sustainable success often comes to those who know when to call in the experts. The best business results scale across multiple people, teams, locations, business units, processes … so why shouldn’t the best leaders scale across multiple resources?

Never stop learning, never stop improving your skills in all of these areas – but know when to bring in the experts to see results that surpass your expectations.

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Post tags: acquisition, author, Change Management, coder, color, Communication, Design, Documentation, education, elegant, hands on experience, horizons, imagination, innovation, Inspiration, interesting stuff, leader, leadership, portfolio management, Presentations, style, subtlety, usability, user interface, visualization, vocalization, writer

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Managing Change: Pick Something, and Do It Well

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:08:00 +0000

This is the first in an series of posts on Managing Change … look for more over the course of the next few weeks …

A common way of expressing the holistic nature of a project is to talk about “People, Process, and Technology”. I’m not sure who came up with this little gem, or in what context, but I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. No particular reason, I think, just that it seems to be gaining a bit of status as a second-tier buzzword or something.

I’ve noticed, however, that people seem very comfortable talking about People, Process, and Technology in the As-Is or To-Be states – but precious little time is spent about the difficulties in getting Change to happen in any of these areas. Project teams and project leaders need to be effective at making Change happen with People, Process, and Technology; maintaining the status quo is comfortable, and envisioning the “nirvana” Future State is easy, but the real challenge comes in making the transition from A to B.

Click to enlarge ...

Project teams need people that have Change skills:

People Change – Soft skills and Emotional Intelligence are typically required, but effective team leaders need to be able to command a room of strong personalities and competing agendas. Some meeting facilitators are direct, and can shout folks down and/or eloquently shift the group’s understanding. Others work indirectly, creating understanding and acceptance in non-threatening, semi-private conversations.
Process Change – It’s easy to say “automate a mess, and you get an automated mess”, but the challenges of process redesign are known to many folks. A certain amount of patience and insight is required to ferret out muda (waste) in the process, to understand and identify the critical elements / tasks, and to aggressively involve the eventual process owners, cementing their commitment for implementation by making them part of the design.
Technology Change – Typically the easiest (and preferred) work area for IT folks, but for those who want to make a difference in IT, it takes the ability to understand and implement new technologies quickly, in a sustainable and supportable fashion. Points are taken off for quickly implementing a fragile system.

WIIFM?

Looking for ways to create concrete objectives for yourself or your teams? The significant Value Add that projects and project teams bring to organizations covers all three areas – People Change, Process Change, and Technology Change. Improvement and effectiveness doesn’t come from raw skills in People, Process, or Technology, but a demonstrated ability to make Change happen in any and all of these three areas.

The opportunity, of course, is to pick one or two of these areas, and build your skills in making Change happen. If you aren’t good in front of a group of people, and are more comfortable working directly with the technology, work on your Change skills by understanding new developments and methods, and figuring out how to use that stuff to make projects and processes happen faster, with higher quality and more predictable outcomes. Looking for a stretch? Get into Process design and development; it’s not always about the bits and bytes, but systems thinking is a big plus, and Process skills are often a great way to bridge from Technology to People skills.

Do you express your value to your team, and your value to the company, in terms of People, Process, and Technology skills? If you want to be successful in IT, work on demonstrating your value by making change happen in those areas. At the very least – be able to articulate how you have succeeded / can be effective at making Change happen.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments |
Post tags: Change Management, creating understanding, emotional intelligence, innovation, Inspiration, knowledge transfer, leadership, managing change, People Management, process redesign, Tech Management, technical communication

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Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:13:00 +0000

A cast of thousands ...

This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered – embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical Among Us.

We’ve all been in large meetings, with tens of people from the project team, along with the expensive consultants, sitting around a table listening to the project manager read their slides to us. The meetings always get scheduled for a full hour (it’s the default in our calendaring system!), and everyone feels the need to speak, if only to make sure their voice has joined the chorus of agreement.

However, many of the Most Cynical Among Us have observed the large number of people in the room, and asked the question “How much is this meeting costing me?” It’s a worthy exercise to go through … so I whipped up a little spreadsheet model to quantify the hard and soft costs …

It doesn’t take long to play with the model and see the dollars add up; even if you don’t believe in tracking “soft costs”, the amount of time spent in meetings can get really big, really fast.

Are status update meetings inherently a waste of time? Absolutely not – communication is critical, and most organizations typically don’t do enough of it. An exercise like this just puts the potential cost, in time and money, in real terms – and reminds us to focus on maximizing that investment.

Can this meeting be avoided? Collaboration platforms (blogs, intranets, etc.) let us update the team virtually; people can get the information when it’s most convenient for them.

Are we communicating effectively? Sometimes, face to face communication is required and preferred – especially when you need to monitor how the message is being received in real time. Hence the broad focus on effective presentations and impactful communications …

Look at the cost of your last meeting – did you get your money’s worth?

PS: I welcome any suggestions for improvements to the model – to request edit access or to get a copy, send email to jpmacl_docs@cazh1.com

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Post tags: business benefits, business value, Collaboration, collaboration systems, cost, Execution, Google, Google Apps, Google Docs, group meetings, Inspiration, meetings, Productivity, project cost, spreadsheet, spreadsheet model, typical group, value, waste of time

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If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:22:00 +0000

As the new year approaches, debates over the “value” of IT and business projects intensify; it’s not holiday stress, but the excitement of the approaching New [fiscal] Year. Lately, I’m hearing more about the struggle to quantify business value, especially when selecting those few projects that will “make the cut”. We will definitely iterate on our scoring framework, adding a cost / benefit template to facilitate more apples-to-apples comparisons between projects (yes, don’t scoff – it is possible – more in a later post …)

However, I think there’s an interesting vision in some people’s minds; a sort of value-optimization Utopia where, even with hundreds of project ideas on the list, the executive team has the insight and ability to select the best projects and fund them appropriately - as long as they all have business values assigned.

I don’t think assigning a value to every proposal is realistic, and certainly not something to aspire to – well, not directly anyway. There are a number of significant hurdles to deal with – the reluctance of people to commit to hard benefits, the lack of suitable productivity metrics for new technologies and methods, and the difficulty of communicating innovations to those who didn’t think it up on their own (ie. close the patent office, we’re done).

Yet, even if you did address all of those problems, and could easily measure impact and communicate effectiveness on 300+ terrific project ideas – how could anyone to claim the ability (or the time!) to rank such a list from “best” to “worst” (or, since I don’t propose projects are bad to begin with – “most best” to “least best”)? Truth is, they don’t – most of the business leaders I’ve worked with have no interest in looking at 300 projects, and would be a tad perturbed if I tried to get them to peruse such a list. Do you appreciate it when your teams bring a thousand problems for you to sort through?

Rules of Thumb

Most people have a favorite way of eating their elephants. Yes, one bite at a time – but where to start? How to carve?

Deliver Small, Iterate, and Evolve: The agile among us would focus on short-term deliverables with small measurable steps to make incremental improvements. Speed and iterations will drive the quality and help focus on those areas of work that have the most short-term promise.

Focus on the Big Rocks: The biggest and toughest problems – or the projects with the most benefit – are sometimes so daunting that they intimidate us into dealing with “the easy stuff”. Clear your calendar and tackle these larger opportunities first, else you’ll never get to them.

Focus on the Constraints: Understand which resources are keeping you from launching multiple projects at once. These are typically people – in key positions, with monopoly knowledge. Simplify things by prioritizing their projects first – but strongly consider launching efforts to remove the constraint, by having them document, train, or automate their knowledge.

Practical Problem Solving

As I proofread this post, it sounds like a checklist for common sense; no surprises, just a different level of detail depending on the organizational level you are speaking with. It’s important to understand the fractal nature of business challenges; no matter where you stand in the organization, the number of items on your ToDo list (and/or the number of challenges you are juggling) is roughly the same. The sooner you can put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and speak to them at the level of detail they (not you) need – the more effective your conversations will be.

Besides, they’re paying you to solve problems, not define them.

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Post tags: agile, benefit, business benefits, corporate information systems, cost, executive team, fractal, Inspiration, PMO, portfolio management, project prioritization, Science, TCO, total cost of ownership, upper management

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A Company is like a Sphere

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:49:00 +0000

Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit – I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring.

A company is like a sphere.

As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the larger a company gets, more people get embedded and hidden from the end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles.

As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a less-than-optimal thing – what percentage of your corporate attention span is customer-focused?

Our Challenge is to poke some pockets into the surface, and get more surface area exposed to the outside air.

Will this help a company go farther? It seems to work for golf balls …
Will this make the company more human? Perhaps, in a self-fulfilling / reverse fractal kind of way …
Will rough edges generate incremental profit? Some counterintuitive friction …

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Post tags: analogies, customer, golf, imagination, Inspiration, interesting stuff, Palo Alto, Research Center, SAP

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Perfect IT

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:44:00 +0000

I once met with a rather thoughtful Project Manager to catch up on things. An interesting person to talk to – it’s the cadence and style of his chat, he’s a fairly laid-back guy. I asked where his Stress comes from – he shows no visible signs of any, and it made me Ponder. We ended up talking about golf, IT Projects, and the “Search for Perfection” in our work.

So, what is “perfection” in the IT world? Is it being able to predict what will come true, and then everything hits as you foretold? Or does it appear when the programming / configuration / cabling is done, and everything does exactly what it was supposed to do?

Consider time-boxed (or agile) projects versus the traditional waterfall style. Is “perfect” achieved by hitting the date (but not getting all the requirements), or should we value delivery of all of the requirements (but not in the originally estimated time)?

Back in the day, we would work to write code that compiled “perfectly” – no severity level 20’s or 10’s, as we used to say in RPG.

What about fault tolerance, scalability, or quality of testing? These “requirements” deliver business value when [bad] things fail to happen (some tao to jones on). Note that these also become bargaining chips when time is tight … ephemera less valuable than squeezing in one last combo box.

Obviously there’s no right answer, but my calm PM friend and I feel that one’s definition of “perfect” says a lot about whether or not you experience stress at work; this is when the conversation switched to golf.

Why do we both like Pasture Pool? Neither of us are competitive by nature; it’s more of a way to search for perfection (or burn an afternoon, or get some bidness done). And the interesting part is, it could be this never-ending search …

Where do you go when you can par your favorite course – for a lower score, or the next course to the left?

According to the zen PM, “if I’m a 15 handicapper, I could get down to 20 handicapper with more practice” [ok, he clearly plays more than I do], which led me to ask what exactly is a “perfect score” – is it par golf? zenPM suggested that a perfect score would be birdie every hole; I thought perfection could be when you hit every fairway and green in regulation, and you’re down in two.

So is perfection “peak performance” [on time], “consistency and predictability” [on budget], or “strictly following the rules” [no 10’s]?

Then we had to get to our next meeting … back to the stress …

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Post tags: agile, emotional intelligence, golf, Inspiration, Project Management, project manager, quality, Requirements, RPG, stress, tao, zen

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