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Visual Business Intelligence

A blog by Stephen Few

About Face — Returning BI to Its RootsDecember 26 2008

In an article entitled “The Changing Face of Business Intelligence,” last month Dave Wells eloquently described how the business intelligence industry has strayed from its original vision and how it is now changing to recover what’s been lost. A longtime veteran of data warehousing and business intelligence, Wells is one of the leaders in the industry who have shaken free of the technology-centric perspective that holds the industry back.

Wells begins by reminding us of Howard Dresner’s original vision when he coined the term “business intelligence” (BI) in the early 1990s. Dresner defined BI as “a set of concepts and methodologies to improve decision making in business through use of facts and fact-based systems.” Over the years, the industry that took hold of Dresner’s visionary term (mostly data warehousing vendors at the time) buried the goal of decision making in an emphasis on technology. As Wells says: “The troubling thing is that all of the definitions are IT-centric” and “too much of today’s business analytics has little connection with real business analysis.”

He goes on to offer a new definition of business intelligence, which recaptures the essence of the original and enhances it to further clarify the goals. I don’t want to give too much away by quoting his definition here; you should read Wells’ words directly.

Data Visualization and Analysis—BI’s Blind SpotsDecember 22 2008

In September, I wrote a rather scathing review of a product called Lyza from a new business intelligence (BI) vendor named LyzaSoft. Part of my criticism was that LyzaSoft erroneously claimed that Lyza qualifies as data analysis and data visualization software. A month later, a good friend and respected colleague, Colin White, took issue with my opinion of Lyza. Thus began an email exchange between us and several other leaders in the field of BI. In this exchange, Colin noticed that we all seemed to use the terms “data analysis” and “data visualization” differently, so he asked each of us to define them. Here are the definitions that I contributed to the discussion:

Data analysis

Data sense-making. The process of discovering and understanding the meanings of data. (Not to be confused with preliminary steps taken to prepare data for the process of analysis.)

Data visualization

The use of visual representations to explore, make sense of, and communicate data. As such, data visualization is a core and usually essential means to perform data analysis, and then, once the meanings have been discovered and understood, to communicate those meanings to others.

On December 17th, Colin wrote about this in an article titled “Business Intelligence Data Analysis and Visualization: What’s in a Name?” Colin

2009 Visual Business Intelligence WorkshopsDecember 17 2008

Due to the popularity of my public workshops in 2008, beginning in 2009 I’ll be teaching my three-day Visual Business Intelligence Workshop in three U.S. locations. In addition to the east coast from June 2-4 in Boston and the west coast from September 29-October 1 in San Francisco, I’ve added a central location from April 21-23 in Austin. You can read about these workshops and register for courses by visiting the Workshops page.

The Mansion at Judges’ Hill in Austin

Also in 2009, for the fifth year in a row I’ll be teaching my workshop in Rome, and I’m currently in discussions about possible workshops in London, São Paulo, and Mumbai.

Infographics—It’s time to put them to the testNovember 25 2008

Visualizations of various types are used to support thinking and communication. I focus on their use for analyzing and presenting quantitative information, but they can also be used for other purposes, such as teaching concepts and procedures, and helping people understand processes and complex systems. With the publication of Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century in 1999, Robert Horn made a compelling case that visualization is a language, which is different from but often collaborates with verbal language. It is definitely true that, when trying to communicate certain information, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” As technologies such as television, video games, and the Internet fill our lives with increasing amounts of visual content, the potential of visualization is now taken for granted. The question remains, however, “Are we using this visual language effectively?”

I decided to address this topic today while looking at an “infographic” about the costs of the war in Iraq shown below, which was created by Good Magazine, based on the book Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes.

Are visual analysis tools poised to become pervasive?October 28 2008

I spent most of last week at InfoVis 2008 in Columbus, Ohio. You might remember that I delivered the capstone presentation last year at InfoVis 2007, which also served as the keynote presentation for VAST 2007 (Visual Analytics Science and Technology). Last week the 2008 edition of this presentation was delivered by Christian Chabot, cofounder and CEO of Tableau Software. Chabot and I share the belief that visual analysis software is needed by a broad audience of people, not just those who have the term “analyst” in their titles. We also share the belief that with well-designed visual analysis tools like Tableau, visual analytics is poised to explode.

Participants in the conference consisted primarily of academics—professors and graduate students who spend their days inventing and refining visualization tools and techniques for making better sense of data. Chabot clearly wanted to challenge this audience to direct more of their efforts toward the practical needs of a broad audience of potential users.

Chabot identified four conditions that have set the stage for the current readiness of visual analytics to take off:

• Data explosion
• Technological advances
• General awareness
• Industry consolidation

The overwhelming amount of information that people now face has created a desperate need for tools that will help them make sense of it. Modern computer hardware and the Web have provided the infrastructure that