As data volumes continue to explode, making sense of all this information becomes increasingly important for organisations and their CIO’s.
Improving data visualisation has been an ongoing process of the last few decades including the use of monitor screens, the advent of spread sheets and the use of web based reporting tools. Today, increasingly complex tools are being developed to help makes sense of enterprise data and to feed decision making and business process improvement.
Underlying the improvements in visualisation is the increasing computing power available and the continued growth in distributed processing. This leads to the capability for more data processing, whether it be integrating data silos within and beyond the organizations or analysing unstructured data such as emails, instant messages and documents.
Access to visualization tools is also becoming easier with growth in intuitive tools that allow drag and drop exploration and drilling down. Information is also accessible in more places with deployment on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
Many organisations however have bottlenecks to making the most of the new tools. Visualisation is only as good as the understanding of the entities and relationships and not all data can be trusted as being of suitable quality. In exploring visualisation options, it is important to know what the business purpose is for visualization and who the audience is.
Rory Ford 