The unmistakable conviction of visual business intelligence
Visual business intelligence represents the summation of BI’s time-honored journey from the backrooms of IT departments to the front offices of business analysts and C level executives alike.
It seamlessly merges the self-service movement’s empowerment of the business via user-friendly technology with the striking data visualizations servicing everything from data preparation to analytics results.
Such visualizations, in conjunction with in-memory technologies and natural language processing (NLP), significantly contributed to the climatic shift of the analytics landscape from data discovery to the era of data exploration in which users parse through datasets at will with point-and-click manipulations of images.
Moreover, interactive visualizations have rendered visual business intelligence capable of achieving that rarest of feats, combining previously distinct realms of data management—data preparation, data modeling, data discovery, analytics, data publishing and data visualizations—into what has frequently become a single platform designed for the business user.
In the process, such tools have made those data management hallmarks and others more intuitive, celeritous and democratic throughout the enterprise today.
Visual business intelligence is based on the interactive visualization technology defined by Gartner Glossary as that which “enables the exploration of data via the manipulation of chart images, with the color, brightness, size, shape and motion of visual objects representing aspects of the dataset being analyzed … These tools enable users to analyze the data by interacting with a visual representation of it.” The virtue of those visualizations lies in their ability to not only provide the user with a comfortable format through which to discover and analyze data for exploratory purposes, but also to furnish the means of publishing the results of analytics with a visual conviction surpassing the mere regurgitation of statistical facts or static graphics. The numerous forms of interactive visualizations include:
The initial proliferation of interactive visualizations serviced by vendors such as Tibco, Tableau and Qlik not only made traditional dependencies on IT for BI archaic, but also contributed to the transitioning of data discovery to data exploration while solidifying the notion of visual BI as the most self-serviceable manifestation of business intelligence.
The transformative effect of data visualizations on the analytics landscape is beyond dispute. What is much more controversial, however, is the outcome of its impact. Opponents of visualization mechanisms claim they create an inordinate reliance on “pretty pictures,” which either distracts or, worse, misleads organizations from focusing on the requisite action begat from analytics insight. Those arguments are currently addressed by visual BI technologies in two ways: with the increasing prevalence of data-driven narratives and the influx of NLP capabilities attending solutions.
