VizWorld.com

YellowFin has a short article on “Best practices” For data analysis and visualization in the Business Intelligence space, and they make a somewhat surprising (and correct) statement that too many people get stuck trying to make flashy and dazzling graphics, forgetting that they’re supposed to be useful before pretty.

Not only can this modern addiction to the sleek and sometimes superficial affect the initial purchase decision, this mindset can place corporate data analysis in a long-term straitjacket. Users of all types will be tempted to dazzle colleagues and clients with impressive looking 3D multi-pie charts and animated graphs to the detriment of the data analysis – The chart, rather than the data, becomes the star of the show. For best practice data analysis, the visualization of that data should only support and facilitate understanding, never distract or detract from it.

This is a trend that’s furthered even more by the constant deluge of infographics that keep popping up around the net.  Rather than condensing mountains of information into a simple understandable image, many of them take one or two sentences and turn it into a 5-screen tall 4Meg image.

via Data analysis & data visualization best practices for Business Intelligence (P1).

Graphics bi, yellowfin

Somewhat in response to a recent article from Gartner that put the BI space firmly in the hands of Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, some users started a poll over at LinkedIn (See it here, account required).  The results are interesting, with Spotfire coming out way in front.

Now, a few things to note first:

• It’s a self-selected sample.. Voters already had LinkedIn accounts and were part of a Data Visualization group
• There were only 5 options (the 4 shown and “Other”), so of course people will gravitate to those 4.

It’s interesting to see the difference in opinion.  I think Gartner is probably right, simply because of the old adage  ”Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.  Smaller companies have more flexible and agile tools, but big business likes buying from big business, so IBM & Microsoft rule those markets.

There are also some interesting demographics to note:

• Younger people seemed to gravitate to Tableau.  I would bet that’s due to Tableau’s recent success in creating a powerful and easy web-embed friendly visualization system that keeps cropping up all over the internet.  Exposure is great advertising.
• Most of the people picking “Other” were older “Managers”, somewhat reinforcing my point above.  The folks with the money are going elsewhere.
• Spotfire, the clear out-and-out winner of the poll had 3/4th of their votes from “all other” people, meaning their job description didn’t fit into the usual suspects.  This could indicate a large freelancer base. (I originally thought students, but the age is a bit high)

If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, I’ve included the entire fully-expanded chart after the break (Showing demographic breakdowns for all 5 choices).

LinkedIn: Polls.

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For folks in the BI space, iRise has just announced a new version of their tool called iRise 8.5.  If offers the usually improvements across the board, but of particular interest is a feature called ‘iBlocs’.  Now, you can create your own macros and visualizations and save them as ‘iBlocs’ to share with coworkers and friends, and they even have a complete starter library on their website.

A set of custom UI components and behaviors packaged as iBlocs are now freely available from the iRise Website, enabling customers of iRise 8.5 to quickly import them into their projects and accelerate the simulation of complex behaviors. This initial delivery of iBlocs is the precursor to a commercial iRise marketplace where partners, customers and developers will build, share and sell iBlocs. iBlocs enable visualization authors to intuitively assemble in seconds visualizations that contain complex behaviors. For the novice user, they offer a path to rapid learning and the capability to build visualizations quickly and simply. For the more seasoned user, the reusable components help enforce best practices in design and usability

While this seems trivial, it’s an important feature that’s cropping up all around us.  As data analysis and visualization grows and moves into new arenas, the first question is always about training: How do we get new users up to speed as fast as possible?  A lot goes into training and simplifying the user interface, but the easiest and best solution is usually to provide good starting points so the users can start over halfway to their goal, and then just tweak a few final parameters.  Tools like VisTrails are a good example of an entire company built around just providing those starting points and libraries to integrate it into tools.  Folks like Tableau do the same with Tableau Public, making it faster to get started so novices and get up and running very quickly, while more advanced users can spend their time refining the details.

via iRise Visualizations Now Ten Times Faster and Easier to Assemble – KansasCity.com.

Science bi, irise, software

FarmVille and Mafia Wars seem simple enough, click a few buttons and then wait for your crops to grow or stamina to regenerate, but under the hood is a wealth of user analytics that has to be parsed and sorted to keep Zynga is business.  They’ve just decided to use Tableau Software to parse all this data.

“With the amount of data Zynga captures daily, our rapid-fire business intelligence and business analytics capabilities match Zynga’s analytical prowess uniquely,” said Tableau’s CEO and co-founder Christian Chabot.  “With Tableau, Zynga can unearth vast amounts of user data in real-time, which will enable them to quickly make product decisions focused on creating the best social gaming experience.”

Congratulations to Tableau for scoring this huge contract! Full press release after the break

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Science bi, tableau, zynga