Press releases, much like other forms of marketing, often venture into the land of spectacular claims–sometimes into the land of nonsense. The June 15, 2006 press release from Business Objects entitled “Business Objects Survey Shows Executives Suffer From Presentation Burn Out; Poll of Over 380 Executives Indicates a Need for More Interactive Presentation Solution” leaps unabashedly into this territory.

First of all, did we really need a survey to figure out that most executives don’t enjoy preparing presentations and spend more time working on them than they prefer. This isn’t terribly surprising. The survey concluded that “while executives have improved access to data, they need solutions that can help them quickly and easily present that information in a visually appealing format.” Business Objects, in an effort to use this conclusion to market their software, has decided that “visually appealing format” equals an interactive display of eye-popping gauges and other graphics using their product Crystal Xcelsius. That’s a bit of a leap.

Another less than logical connection made in this press release is that the excessive time and struggle that executives put into creating these presentations, which “often takes them one or more hours to convert data in Excel spreadsheets into a format for a meeting or presentation” can be solved by using Crystal Xcelsius. Any executive who is challenged by creating a simple table or graph in Excel isn’t going to find salvation in Crystal Excelsius. Even the executive’s assistant, who is the one who really creates the presentation in most cases, probably won’t find Crystal Xcelsius easier or faster to use than Excel.

Aside from these self-serving non-sequiturs, what disturbs me most about this press release is the suggestion that executives feel they must be talented graphical artists to create effective presentations, which is a strength of relatively few. Here’s the real problem: these executives are focusing on the wrong goal. When an executive makes a presentation, such as to the board, the goal should be to inform—to present the truth and perhaps to persuade. This doesn’t require artistic talent; it requires reasoning and communication, which are abilities that every executive ought to possess. It doesn’t help to dress up the information and make it dance on the screen if the message you’re trying to communicate isn’t in itself compelling, doesn’t make sense, or is buried in obscure language. If the information is important, the arguments are logical, and the communication is clear, the presentation will likely be compelling.

More time ought to be dedicated to thinking through the issues and preparing good arguments, and then in crafting a message that presents them clearly. If the audience really cares about the information, this is the type of presentation that they’ll appreciate most. If the board really just wants to be entertained with fluffy animated graphics, God help the business.

Using clear and simple graphs to present quantitative data can be very powerful if the information is important. Dressing it up with graphical glitz can only distract and might even muddle an otherwise simple message. The smart executive knows this. Smart (but perhaps not ethical) executives realize that the best use of graphical glitz is to draw the audience’s attention away from the data. It’s an age-old magician’s trick.

I just stumbled upon an article in Optimize magazine by Betsy Burton and Mark McDonald of Gartner entitled “Smarter Use of Business Intelligence” (May, 2006) that I found refreshing and encouraging. In it, they argue, much as I often do, that BI needs to become less technology-centric and more focused on the needs, goals, and abilities of the people and businesses that the technology is meant to serve. Here’s an excerpt:

“To capitalize on the real value and potential of BI, users should turn more traditional approaches upside down–shifting the focus from technology that serves a small segment of decision-maker to a much broader initiative that puts people and business objectives first. Leading BI initiatives are interactive, flexible processes that take into account the needs and skills of people within the company. This means viewing BI as a continuum that spans diverse users–including manager, workers, sales representatives, senior executives, partners, customers, and suppliers–where tools identify new business opportunities, integrate business processes, and build collaboration across the business.”

I appreciate this reminder, from the organization that defined the term “business intelligence” in the first place, of the essential goals of BI, and the focus on the business and people that is necessary to achieve them. Burton and McDonald believe that this evolutionary shift is already happening. They write, “There are two major forces fueling the BI evolution: a higher degree of usability in applications to integrate more fully within business processes, and increased technical knowledge on the part of the average worker.” I hope this is true. Sometimes it is hard to see when you’re down in the trenches fighting to make it happen.

Take care,

I recently wrote an article that featured the book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, by two Stanford business professors, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton. This is a book about management, which argues that business decisions should be based on evidence, and goes on to lay out some of the principles and practices that enable this process. Some of you might have read just far enough to determine that the article wasn’t about business intelligence in a direct sense and ended your perusal at that point. “What does a book about management have to do with business intelligence?,” you might have asked before moving on to other activities more directly tied to your work. Actually, many intimate connections exist between the way our businesses are managed and the role of business intelligence. Evidence-based management looks fondly upon business intelligence as essential.

We err when we divide our work and our lives in general into discrete departments with little overlap. I’ve found that many of my greatest insights were discovered at the crossroads between domains of knowledge. I believe that it is not only enlightening to recognize interconnections between the many aspects of our lives and domains of our knowledge, it is also healthy to take this approach. Too many errors–some downright atrocities–occur when we fail to appreciate life as a complex and marvelous system of interconnections.

My interest and commitment to business intelligence is closely aligned with other aspects of my life. I believe that reason is the best arbiter of most decisions, despite occasional failures to embrace it. I believe that, if you want to understand the world, you should use the full resources of your intelligence and that of others to consider the evidence. Decisions and positions that ignore the evidence, especially those that are rooted in a brand of thinking that admits no contradiction (for instance, faith), are the cause of mistakes and the source of misery.

It is all interconnected. To apply the light of reason to your work but disregard it in other aspects of your life is a disconnect that I find disturbing. People who entrust their lives to the progress of medical research but passionately attack the evidence of evolutionary biology because it conflicts with a collection of ancient religious writings is a failure of reason. The rhetoric of a political liberal defending the inalienable rights of another culture to mistreat its people in the spirit of cultural relativism is equally inconsistent and irrational.

Failures to live rationally, upon an ethical foundation that need not resort to leaps of faith to justify the kind treatment of others, are certainly not unique to our day. In most respects, reason exercises more influence today than at any point in our history, but not enough in a time when we are destroying our environment at an increasing rate and have the means to destroy all life in an instant were unreasonable people to possess those means.

The passion that we bring to business intelligence should be part of a larger passion that we bring to life. It is all interconnected. We have such marvelous brains. In our day especially, a brain is indeed a dangerous thing to waste.

Take care,

I find it helpful from time to time to step back, take a lingering look at where I am and what I’m doing, then remind myself of what really matters in life. Perhaps I’m more introspective than most, but I believe the world would benefit from a bit more self-evaluation, both by individuals and by the collective bodies that affect our world, including businesses. I advocate more than the annual development of a budget or the formulaic and superficial construction of a strategic plan. I am talking about seriously asking variations of the same big questions that we wrestle with as individuals, like “Why are we here?”, “Are we giving something useful to the world?”, “Are we doing good work?”, “Are we living our values?”, and “Are we fulfilling our mission and is that mission worthwhile?”

Here is where I’m going with this: It’s high time that the companies that provide the products and services of business intelligence (BI) ask themselves these hard questions as well, because in many ways they have lost touch with their reason for being and have fallen short of their mission, especially when compared to the critical and still largely unmet needs surrounding information – its meaning and use.

Customers spend an enormous amount of time and money on BI technology, only to have it deliver too little far too often because of a failure in the very last stage of the process: the attempt to make sense of that information and the communication of its meaning to those responsible for doing something about it. You could spare no expense in developing an award-winning data warehouse with the most pristine, meaningful data imaginable, and implement the best BI software on the most powerful hardware known to humankind, but if the people who access the data, determine its meaning, and present the results to decision makers can’t take that last step effectively, your entire BI investment is worthless.

But who is doing something about this problem or even talking about it? Hardly anyone in the BI industry is saying a word. They are busy talking about lots of important stuff, but not this. Things that matter far less distract the BI industry from its essential goal. Marketing often gets caught up in communications that are superficial, constructed entirely of buzzwords and clichés, obscuring in bombastic messages what could be expressed quite simply and clearly.

If you haven’t done so already, I invite you to read my two May articles, which both touch indirectly on the concerns that I’ve expressed in this blog entry:

Excel’s New Charting Engine: Preview of an Opportunity Missed

Hard Facts: Why Are Business Decisions So Seldom Based On Them?

Take care,

My intention in this blog entry is twofold: 1) to introduce a useful data visualization newsletter, and 2) to challenge an opinion that was stated in the current edition of the aforementioned newsletter. For some time now I’ve enjoyed the monthly edition of a newsletter written by Juan C. Dürsteler, published through his Web site at InfoVis.org. Mr. Dürsteler writes about topics that range across the entire data visualization spectum. His newsletter has often introduced me to organizations, sites, studies, and products that I hadn’t previously known. I appreciate his dedication to this work.

In the April issue of the newsletter, Mr. Dürsteler made a statement with which I disagree:

Representing the passing of time has its difficulties. Depicting space is relatively easy, since it can be bound to the concept of axis. An axis can be run in both directions and can appropriately reference the spatial dimension.

Time, nevertheless is not well represented by a line since it isn’t a spatial dimension and, moreover, it’s irreversible. Paradoxically, the widest used metaphor is that of the line. Maybe the key to it is considering time as just a state of space.[Emphasis mine.]

I believe that the use of a line to encode quantitative data in two-dimensional graphs with X and Y axes works extremely well for helping us to visualize, concpetualize, and make sense of values as they change through time. We naturally think of time as linear, thus using a line to depict it works well. Doing so in a horizontal manner from left to right (for those whose languages are written from left to right) is a convention we easily understand. Depicting increases in value as inclined slopes and decreases as downward slopes uses differences in 2-D position relative to a quantitative scale along the Y (vertical) axis in a way that even children can learn to interpret with little difficulty.

Certainly, no visual representation can depict time in all its complexity, but that’s hardly the point. When we use graphs to visualize time-series data, we’re doing something conceptually simple using a visual method that communicates just as simply. A line graph is an elegant solution that works incredibly well. There are occasions when other methods might be needed to depict time, but for making sense of and communicating most quantitative data, these occasions are infrequently required.

Despite my disagreement with Mr. Dürsteler on this particular point, I highly recommend his newsletter as a thought-provoking resource.