Does visualising your data make for better business intelligence?
Data Visualisations, A picture paints a thousand words.
If you want to look up a single value or need a total, "Sales of wigdets for period X" then a cross tab report is by far the best way to go. However our requirements tend to be more complex. How did we do is an important question, how are we doing a more important question and the answer we all would like to know is how are we going to do. As such we rely on trends, and numbers do not communicate trends as well as visualisations. A wonderdul example of a simple visualisation or data vizualization is the London underground in the UK. A simple map that is a recognised emblem of the UK and London the world over.
Need to grab someone attention fast!
There is no doubt that charting / mapping / visualisating your data will make for a more effective presentation. Visualisations have progressed beyond the pie chart. Today we expect a choice of chart and increasingly maps, as well as having the option to drop in appropriate background images. Google does this very well with Maps and street level view.
A picture paints a thousand words.
Gartner states Tibco, Qliktech and Tableau are leaders in visualizations.
If Visualisations are the most important feature for you then Tibco Spotfire is worth a look, however it was reported on as a high-end niche product by Gartner and has higher than average licence costs than Tableau for example. Qlikview from Qliktech is another strong contender, connecting quickly to data and visualisation.
For further information on the use of visualisations it is worth referring to Stephen Few who is a leading authority on this subject and has a number of publications.
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