Capabilities for Data Discovery and Business Alignment

Interactive Visual Analysis is being applied today to solve a number of challenges in business related to data discovery and business alignment.

Data discovery has become a significant challenge because business users need to be able to explore multidimensional data environments without knowing programming languages or high-end analytics applications. Reporting systems today are helpful for getting answers to known questions; but, sometimes the question to be asked is unknown.

Interactive Visual Analysis solves the data discovery challenge by allowing novices to find patterns, distributions, correlations and/or anomalies across multiple attributes using visual cues to explore and understand the data. Data elements are highlighted by size and color while multiple filters can be applied to determine which data is presented. Useful metaphors, including heat maps, bubble charts, and clusters, put information into context. In analyzing large data sets, the user can fluidly navigate between high-level summaries to more detailed views to find root causes and to identify the source of patterns. The resulting effect makes it easy to resolve the proverbial challenges of seeing “the forest from the trees” and “finding the needle(s) in a haystack.”

Business alignment challenges arise because teams need to make use of multiple domains of information to optimize productivity between team members. Small slices of information and out of context information make it difficult to align teams, projects, processes, resources and results; therefore, most teams work to pull information and compare it manually – an extremely time-consuming, error-prone effort.

With Interactive Visual Analysis, teams can easily conduct status, metrics, and time-based reporting, while automatically being alerted when thresholds are exceeded or deadlines could be missed. With dynamic controls and views, users can test hypotheses and model scenarios based on historical data and planned timelines. Through functionality for project/portfolio management, risk management, resource allocation, scenario modeling and portfolio optimization, teams can share plans, ideas, thoughts, opinions and views of the current state of business operations. Users then gain a better understanding of how issues and opportunities identified in their processes will affect other areas of the business. Interactive Visual Analysis helps individuals and groups identify and understand relationships that would be otherwise difficult to see with large volumes of data.

Increasing Data Availability Fuels Demand for Visualization Solutions

Reporting/output has always been treated as an afterthought. In implementing enterprise systems, the focus is usually placed on the data or business process being captured. As a result, analysis of the data and/or business processes became a secondary challenge to be addressed in a later phase.

The shift to more analysis of information has coincided with the consolidation and organization of data outside of business applications. A data warehouse or data mart is a database that consolidates and organizes information from across multiple applications into a data structure optimized for analytical applications. During the past five years, data warehouse adoption has steadily increased. New technologies including XML integration tools and service-oriented architectures have helped to drive adoption of warehouse strategies, where size has often grown to beyond two or three terabytes. These structured repositories provide highly available content primed for analysis.

hile early database technologies couldn’t handle these high volumes of data, today’s higher-processor power scales to perform effectively against even complex requests such as predictive analysis models and large aggregate queries. The combination of data availability and rapid response times creates a new opportunity to drive efficiency from compiled warehouse data. For IT departments – who need to secure budget for ongoing maintenance and future expansion – new reporting/output capabilities will further extend the value of data warehouse projects.