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A conversation about DataViz, experimentation, and a new way to do business

I met with Phil Simon, author of The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions, last week to talk about the book, his own story, and how the Visual Organization uses data visualizations.

Phil Simon’s new book, The Visual Organization builds on his previous books that point the way to new paradigms for business in an always-on, data-rich, connected world. In this book, he goes beyond talking just about the data to what can turn a company into a business that knows about itself and its customers far beyond what the HR department or the Quarterly Report indicates. That takes becoming what he calls, a “Visual Organization”: a company that can feed information about itself and its customers into data visualizations that speak quickly, directly, and powerfully, to guide fast decision making and provide a foundation for innovation, change and growth.

The learning he shares in the book stems from his years working with data, first in HR in a corporate environment to becoming a consultant and advisor to businesses that are feeling the dramatic effect of changes from technology over the past 15-20 years. Phil knows that being connected (both internally and externally) through social media isn’t enough, and using formulas that haven’t changed in years to monitor activity, both within and without, is deadly. The overwhelming flood of data, structured and unstructured, that pours through the veins of the internet, out of handheld devices, and from the next generation of sensors and human measurement devices forming The Internet of Things is already changing the business model for giant companies like Netflix, Amazon, Google and Apple, much smaller ones, such as Wedgies, and educational institutions, such as the University of Texas.

This model is what Phil calls The Visual Organization, and while he admits there’s not a single fixed version of what a Visual Organization looks like, it’s possible to become one by starting to move past the old extract, transform, and load (ETL) model of managing data and producing static reports to exploring customer sentiment, discovering new patterns from small variations made visually accessible, and creating informative and explorable visualizations that make it easy to pivot, experiment, and ask “what if?” questions on the spot.

This new company also communicates differently, with more openness and less rigid structure of control, particularly the control of data and information. This kind of company often focuses on the people and the platform rather than the product, as Dave Gray’s The Connected Company might also suggest.

Phil mentions in the interview that, along with the use of full color and even full page illustrations to give justice to the visualizations, this is the first of his six books to contain an appendix titled Supplemental Dataviz Resources. In the interview, he prefaced his comments about the resources mentioned with the acknowledgement that it isn’t comprehensive, and with the rapidly-changing playing field of both big data companies and data visualization services it can’t be considered the final word. He does, however, attempt to highlight the companies, products and services that are good entry points based on offering open-source versions and other ways to get started in becoming a Visual Organization.

The underlying subtext I discovered in the book and had confirmed by Phil in our interview is that the change is less about the use of particular software or hiring more data visualization scientists to do research and analysis. Rather, it’s about being willing to experiment and fail.

“This is more of a management book than a technology one, and certainly more so than a pure Dataviz book than ones from Tufte and Stephen Few…I do think there’s a real danger in having someone in IT design a tool for six months, a year, then it gets rolled out to the line and they say, ‘I don’t know how to use this’. That’s not very agile.”

For the entire conversation, including his answer to my question about how a statistician can become a storyteller, please watch the interview above. For an even deeper dive into becoming a visual organization, look into obtaining a copy of the book, The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions.