Today, I was briefed on a new software product (not SalesAdvizor, which I’ll get to shortly), which provides dashboard and visual analysis functionality. During the course of the briefing, I occasionally asked if they were planning to provide particular visual analysis features that I consider not only useful but essential. A common response was, “We’ve considered that, but didn’t want to include any features that were too complicated for typical business users.” I fully support vendors’ efforts to keep software simple, but the most powerful graphs and techniques that have yet to be incorporated into all but a few business intelligence products, although unfamiliar, are extremely simple to understand and use. The fact that a particular type of graph or technique for interacting with data is used primarily by scientists or engineers doesn’t by definition make it complicated. For instance, even though box plots are unfamiliar to most business people and for that reason can seem intimidating, I can teach any business person of average intelligence how to comfortably read a box plot in a matter of minutes. I know this for a fact, because I do this routinely in my visual analysis workshop. Business intelligence vendors must learn to make a distinction between features that are truly complicated or useful only to a small set of specialists and those that are simply unfamiliar, but conceptually easy to learn and extremely useful to a broad audience.

I wrote the entire preceding paragraph to set the stage for this statement: I get very excited when a software vendor introduces powerful visual analysis methods to a broad business audience in a way that isn’t intimidating. Advizor Solutions has just started doing this in a new way, in the form of a product called SalesAdvizor. This is nothing but an application for analyzing sales data tailored specifically for users of Salesforce.com, which was built using the general purpose visual analysis software Advizor Analyst. Not only does this pre-package useful means to examine and analyze sales data, but it slips in several features that people might shy away from if introduced using technical terms such as “brushing” or “dynamic filters,” which seem perfectly natural and easy to learn when delivered as a pre-packaged sales analysis product.

I believe this is fertile ground for good visual analysis products. Find a popular business application that lacks good analytics (that is, most of them), such as Salesforce.com, and then use your software to build a custom visual analysis application for it. Business people who might suffer paralysis if required to build an analysis process from scratch, will often welcome one that’s already predesigned for the task and integrated into the familiar territory of an application they already use. Furthermore, I predict that these same business people, after a little practice with an analytical application such as this, will soon venture out to create new analyses on their own, involving graphs and data interaction techniques they would have previously avoided as the intimidating and ethereal territory of experts.

My hat is off to Advizor Solutions for spotting this opportunity with Salesforce.com and putting a powerful analytical tool in their customers’ hands. The key to the success of a venture like this, assuming it’s built on the foundation of a good visual analysis product, is the domain expertise (in this case, a deep knowledge of sales and how it should be analyzed) and the data visualization expertise that’s built into it. If you don’t understand sales, the best visual analysis tool in the world won’t save the day. Nor will it overcome poor visual design practices, such as using segmented pie charts to examine part-to-whole relationships, rather than simple bar graphs, which are much easier to read. I hope the best for Advizor Solutions new venture and hope that other good visual analysis software vendors will follow their lead.

Take care,