Picture This: Smarter Data | WPN World People News

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” That belief is near religion in many organizations. I’d like to propose a modern corollary: “If you can’t see it, you can’t use it.”

Full Monty: The Allosphere lets researchers literally climb inside their data to explore in 3D.

Okay, maybe that could be stated more elegantly. But I think the message is right. Namely, that to effectively leverage their vast troves of data, organizations must move beyond capturing, organizing, distributing and protecting to better “visualizing” that data. To make it more graspable, more usable, more exciting, more mobile, more interactive, more valuable and even perhaps more beautiful.

I confess this is not a completely original idea. Deloitte picked visualization as a top technology trend of 2011, noting: “Data volumes continue to explode, as unstructured content proliferates via collaboration, productivity and social channels. And while organizations are making headway on enterprise information management and broad analytics solutions, much potential insight is buried within static reports to which only a small fraction of the organization has access.

This static, tabular approach runs counter to fundamental patterns of human thinking; our brains have been tuned to recognize shapes, detect movement and use touch to explore surroundings and make connections. Thus, the true value of business intelligence is often lost as companies struggle to communicate complicated concepts and empower more stakeholders. The good news: These new developments can yield tremendous value for the organization, particularly when applied to the largely green-field terrain of unstructured data.”

One big reason, Deloitte says, is the rapid evolution of underlying tools and technologies. Notable are visualization suites that complement BI/BA platforms with rich graphics, 3D perspectives and interactivity and usability comparable to consumer experiences on smartphones and tablets. Unstructured data from social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Trulia and location-specific sites are also big drivers, as are mobile applications. Deployed on foundational enterprise information management and information automation disciplines, these new technologies give organizations unprecedented power to visualize large, high-density data sets and integrated siloed data—within and beyond their organizations.

Source : Smarter Technology