BI Visual Innovations

Ninety percent of the information we (humans) process is visual in nature. We’re able to process visual information much faster than reading words or interpreting numbers in a spreadsheet. Organizations are evolving how business intelligence and analytics are being delivered. This transformation is impacting user interfaces and output formats through the use of colors, shapes, objects, images, and sizing.  Innovations with interactive content creation and intuitive interfaces are critical elements for wide scale user adoption. Apple proved the importance of these features when they released the iPod and iTunes Store.  Business Intelligence technologies continues to deliver tremendous value to every industry and the vendors that expand the utility of their technology beyond technically inclined workers will be successful for a very long time.   

Infographic’s are gaining steam with the rise in data storytelling. Now businesses can automatically generate and distribute thousands, even millions, of personalized infographics just like they can today with statements and reports.  The infographics are customized for each recipient to display highly relevant information, such as account or business activity, which is populated directly from corporate data sources. Below is an example.

There’ an interactive document format available called ADF, which stands for Analytical Document Format. ADF has the features of PDF, Excel and dashboards all rolled together. Just like Excel, users can interact with the data within the ADF document except the underlying data values can’t be changed. Hooray for data governance. Just like dashboards, ADF documents can contain multiple tabs with different KPIs on each tab. Just like PDF, ADF documents are portable so they can be emailed to anyone inside or outside of the company. The example below is an e-statement that contains seven interactive dashboards. Displayed in the image below are the Account Activity and Allocations dashboards. The Account Activity dashboard has a contribution percentage field that the recipient can change so they can see how it impacts the balance they'll have in their account at retirement. The Allocations dashboard has small triangles next to the Fund, Balance, and Allocation % columns on the dashboard. This denotes Excel-like functions are available to perform on the data associated to that field. Just click on the triangle, select a function from the menu and see the results.

There’s a term that’s being used to define a new category of self-service analytics. InfoApps are the anti-BI tool for non-technical business users. Most business users don’t want to learn a tool. InfoApps are making every user unconsciously competent with creating reports, visualizations, and data discoveries. InfoApps utilize a highly parameterize interface just like what you see on Amazon, Expedia, Southwest Airlines, and a million other websites. Every aspect of the users’ interactions is parameterize which delivers tremendous flexibility and ease of use. Users are immediately productive and are no longer dependent on others for creating analytical content. Similar to the apps you download to your smartphone, InfoApps are intuitive, require no training, and deliver quick answers. Below is an InfoApp for a financial organization. This InfoApp can generate over 50 billion unique visualizations and reports. InfoApps are being used in Report and BI consolidation projects. Thousands of unique reports and visualizations are being replaced by a handful of InfoApps.

There are two very subtle but important concepts that I want to highlight. The first has to do with the infographic and the interactive e-statement. The underlying person and data is the same. The person and the data are system generated demo data but the same data was used in creating both documents. I suspect some individuals will find the infographic much easier to understand while others will find the interactive e-statement much easier. The second concept is related to how technology is delivered. The technology behind the three images share a common theme. All of these innovations were delivered in a fashion that no training is needed for the consumer/recipient of the content. This is critical for wide scale user adoption.