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Business Intelligence
Visualize This
5/1/2008
Powerful Data Visualization for Internal Eyes
Though these examples of real-time web-based visualizations may spur site visitors into action, the real challenge for higher ed administrators is internal change. Here again are new approaches in desktop software that make it easier for users to produce high-impact data visualizations, and simultaneously overcome the challenge of distribution of data across the institution.
Intuitive and user-friendly. Tableau Software, for one, takes data that have been structured for multi-dimensional reporting and provides a drag-and-drop style interface that helps end users intuitively create a variety of sophisticated visualizations. The company emphasizes the unique visualization query language (VizQL) as the key to helping “people with little or no training see and understand data faster than ever, and in ways like never before.” To help end users share their reports, a free “reader” is available for download, or a server version can be purchased for publishing to the web.
Look again at Excel. One tool that can't be ignored when it comes to the distribution of information and visualizations is Excel. Maybe you've sneered at the relative blandness of graphs produced through Excel's chart wizard, but the fact is that the product is ubiquitous—so ubiquitous, in fact, that nearly all of the major BI vendors have produced add-ins and special interfaces to surface information through Excel. Most recently, Business Objects released a new product, Xcelsius 2008, which uses Excel as the presentation engine for dashboards and dynamic data visualizations, taking advantage of Excel's pervasiveness, and so easing the distribution of data. Take a look!
The 800-pound gorilla. Then, of course, there is Microsoft. Many institutions have already made significant investments in Microsoft technology for a variety of reasons, and yours may be one of them. Once you have upgraded to the latest versions of Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 and Office 2007, you may be surprised to find that you already own an enterprise-class business intelligence engine. Moreover, did you know that Microsoft has placed considerable emphasis on the communication aspect of data analysis and has improved the visualization features significantly? With true integration between Excel and PowerPoint, users will be able to produce great-looking boardroom-ready reports that are updated automatically when the source data are refreshed. And, just in case you doubt Redmond's commitment to business intelligence, Microsoft has recently unveiled several updates to its core technologies to support business intelligence and improve data visualization, including an all-new version of SQL Server (2008, to be released in the third quarter of the year) and its dashboard and performance management solution, PerformancePoint Server.
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