Why Maps and Visualizations with BI? It’s called Report Appeal.
Posted by Dave Kerr on Mon, Feb 07, 2011
Tell me if you have ever heard this statement before:
“Business Intelligence software allows users to make better business decisions.”
It may be the most over-used statement in the BI industry.
The concept sounds simple – give business users data, they will be better informed, and they will make better business decisions. There's often a problem, however, at the report level. The report the IT department creates for a user tends not to meet the user’s needs. Sometimes the report doesn’t offer enough information, sometimes it offers too much information, sometimes it’s too difficult to understand, and sometimes it just doesn’t appeal to the user.
Appeal?
That’s right, sometimes the look, feel, and unappealing nature of a report simply turns a user off. In turn, the report is offered to large numbers of users but few users actually consume the report. Would you rather look at a 9 page tabular report full of figures, or a map that gives you an immediate picture of how sales are in a particular region and the opportunity to dig for further details on that specific region? The data is the same in both cases, but the way it is presented to a user is significantly different.
A couple of weeks ago, Network World published an article on the top 5 innovation opportunities for CIO’s in 2011. On the second page of that list was ‘data visualization’. They pointed to data visualization as providing a different, more appealing, visual context. This means allowing users to view data in the form of a graph, chart, image, or map.
What Network World calls innovative is something we have been talking about and selling for years. But we still applaud the publication for recognizing that the visual appeal of a report matters. If organizations are truly striving for the ultimate goal of better business decisions, they need to start with making their reports more appealing to users.