Key Decisions Require Vision:
Next-Generation Business Intelligence through Interactive Visual Analysis

In business, the best information wins. But today’s enterprises are struggling to make use of the volumes and complexity of available data. Next-generation, visual technologies can eliminate the pains associated with reporting and information analysis, helping organizations make the right decisions faster and with more confidence.

The Best Information Wins

Thomas Davenport wrote in his groundbreaking 2005 Harvard Business Review article, Competing on Analytics, how market-leading organizations including Walmart, Dell, Harrahs and Capital One have adopted the use of analytics as a strategic competitive differentiator. In every industry, organizations are realizing that to win in their markets, they need to learn from the data they collect in their enterprise systems in order to create competitive process improvements.

Data has never been more plentiful and available. Transactional applications such as ERP, SCM, CRM, and enterprise project management have matured and now gather large volumes of information about both internal and external business processes. Unstructured data has also increased in volume from the widespread usage of web sites, email, knowledge management, XML and enterprise data storage systems. All of this data is now consolidated into data warehouses for use in analytical applications.

Today’s Business Intelligence Tools were Designed for a Simpler World

Unfortunately, having access to data is not the same as effectively using it. Users with the opportunity to analyze more data are often overwhelmed and frustrated by the amount of effort required to make sense of it all. Most organizations today use tools that were developed when networks and processors were slow, disk space was expensive, and databases were unable to handle complex queries. These applications fail to present information clearly to business users when there are multiple dimensions of data to integrate into a decision.

Data in high-level summaries, such as in simple dashboards, is presented in a rigid fashion and does not provide explanations of “why” results are as they appear. The drill-downs to detail reports and associated search tools generate simple row and column views that have become long (or longer) lists with text or numbers displayed out of context. More often than not, knowledge workers are unable to find answers to their questions through these systems alone. Because business people do not have a way to access and explore their data themselves, they usually end up attempting one of three dysfunctional strategies:

  • Dysfunctional Strategy #1: Request custom reports for every new issue.
    Since business users must rely upon analytical programmers to create custom reports, each new reporting request becomes a new project for IT. Organizations are finding that up to 80% of their resources are allocated to custom reporting requests. Lack of IT resources and/or bandwidth limits the number of custom reports that can be created, leaving many key questions unanswered.
  • Dysfunctional Strategy #2: Work around the IT infrastructure.
    Using spreadsheets and ad-hoc desktop databases, business users create their own reports by cutting and pasting information from multiple reports and data sources. This manual, repetitive and highly inefficient process transforms expensive knowledge workers into overpaid administrators. The resulting reporting is error prone, easily bottlenecked, not standardized across departments, and often done redundantly with varying results.
  • Dysfunctional Strategy #3: Operate without the information.
    If the information cannot be made available in time for a decision, then business users will work without the information entirely or ignore problems and opportunities that cannot be analyzed. This approach adds strategic and operating risks.

The traditional means of generating reports and dashboards need to be extended to help knowledge users answer the complex questions that affect corporate performance. New solutions are required to keep pace with growing business complexity.

Next: Introducing Interactive Visual Analysis