VideoNow data is pulled from various transactional systems. It's then crunched to give a quick visual read on, say, inventory levels, raw-materials prices, order volumes, quality-control checks, and so on.
The system relies on software from Burlington, Massachusetts-based Cognos Inc., which has found success with the Visualizer component of its business intelligence suite.
But Don Campbell, Cognos's vice president of product innovation and technology, admits that data visualization is still something of a secret. "After companies use it, they wonder how they got along without it," he says. "But it's rare that people will ask for it unless they've seen it somewhere else."
Almost all software companies in the business intelligence, budgeting/forecasting, and data analytics markets offer at least rudimentary visualization: graphs, dashboards, scorecards, color-coded metrics, and the like. Cognos also offers animation, multimetric displays, and mapping, and smaller companies such as Spotfire, Visual Insights, and Illumitek have put more elaborate forms of visualization at the center of their offerings.
Compudigm's see-Power product transfers not only structured data, such as financial information, into pictures, but unstructured data as well. Baltimore-based Cedar Enterprise Solutions Inc. uses Compudigm's software as part of one of its solutions to, for example, create a picture of media coverage of a company, enabling that company to see whether public perception matches the reality the company hopes to project.
Compudigm got its start in the gaming industry, helping casinos understand traffic patterns so that slot machines could be optimally placed. Since then it has expanded into financial services, telecom, and retail, in each case helping companies make sense of the reams of customer data they collect but often fail to use.
One area ripe for data visualization may be human resources. Compudigm maintains that its software can take thousands of résumés and overlay data points such as salary and expenses to help companies spot patterns.
Is there, for example, unusually high turnover in a given function, and does that correlate to how much is being spent (or not being spent) on training? Visualization seems best suited to those scenarios in which decisions depend on a grasp of qualitative and quantitative data spread across different computer systems within a company.
But visualization can also play a role in making relatively simple information accessible at a glance. Ambient Devices offers a range of wireless devices, from pens and wristwatches to a desktop "orb," that light up, change color, or otherwise signal a change in the status of information. From stock portfolio performance to the health of an aging parent or the score of the big game, the devices can be configured by users to give an instant read on the matter at hand.
Visualization is also carving out a middle ground between the simplicity of executive dashboards (and orbs) and the complex rendering of scientific or cross-functional data.
Cary, North Carolina-based business-intelligence software maker SAS Institute Inc., for example, produces "strategy maps" that correlate strategic objectives with hard numbers, showing how internal processes measure up to predetermined goals. That visualization capability is part of its SAS Strategic Performance Management software, which is designed to support balanced-scorecard and similar enterprisewide strategy efforts.
"As businesses increasingly focus on processes," argues Jonathan Hornby, a member of the company's worldwide marketing strategies group, "the easiest way to see them and communicate them is with maps."
He points to a September 2000 article in the Harvard Business Review by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, both well known for their work on the concept of balanced scorecards, which noted that such maps give employees "a clear line of sight" as to how their jobs are connected to the organization's goals.
Embedding such maps into software that integrates and analyzes data from many sources can be useful, and so intuitive that employees who use it may not even stop to appreciate the value that visualization brings.
"On the one hand, visualization is fighting for recognition at a time when budgets have flat-lined," says Robert Moran, vice president and managing director for data knowledge and analytics at Boston-based consulting firm Aberdeen Group. "On the other hand, the technology tends to get built into various products and is thus taken for granted."
Despite that, Moran believes that visualization will soon get its due, thanks largely to the need to react quickly to an expanding torrent of real-time data.
Productivity is also an issue. At LaSuisse Insurance in Laussane, Switzerland, Gabriel Fuchs, a manager in sales and marketing, says that visualization software (from Spotfire Inc.) is ideal for employees who aren't particularly computer-savvy. "But the people who really love it," he says, "are the hardcore spreadsheet users, because they can do in two seconds what used to take them 20 minutes."
Visualization, it seems, has put things in a whole new perspective.
You Oughta Be in Pictures
As beneficial as it may be to see data, it may be even more helpful to walk around and touch it.
Mountain View, California-based Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) offers, as part of a broader line of visualization technologies, "Reality Centers," specially equipped rooms that allow groups of employees to interact with data in a hands-on way. Powered by SGI Onyx supercomputers, special projectors display the data, in some cases as stereo graphics images, and employees don eyewear and other paraphernalia developed for virtual-reality applications.
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