Visual Business Intelligence
Visualization is a rapidly expanding discipline that not only supports big data , but can enable enterprises to collaborate more effectively, analyse real time and historical data for faster trading, develop new models and theories, consolidate IT infrastructure or demonstrate past, current and future data centre performance.
Visualization enables the abstraction of meaning from the mining and consolidation of different and complicated data sources and can be applied to both the business and technology sides of financial markets for competitive advantage. Through the innovative application of images and technology, customers are able to see, explore, share and act on large quantities of information in new and meaningful ways.
Collaboration, analytics, reporting and modelling provide visualisation capabilities well beyond just two dimensional graphs and spread sheets. With the onset of rich new tools, the explosion of data volumes across all organisational departments, the rising quality of enterprise information and analytics and the acceptance of social media, open innovation and collaboration, the time is right to harness it for competitive advantage.
There are challenges with visualization and the key to its successful adoption is to recognise that it can be applied to all levels within an organisation and to create an environment where it can be readily adopted and harnessed to full effect.
Challenges
Business users have normally complained about their lack of visibility to their data, as well as the limited options for manipulating and exploring the information affecting their business.
Traders now expect to analyse complex data and monitor trade performance in real-time to maintain their competitive advantage.
Managers everywhere are concerned about reducing costs, improving efficiency, and helping employees make well-informed decisions.
Effective data visualization is an important tool in the decision making process. It allows business decision makers to quickly examine large amounts of data, expose trends and issues efficiently, exchange ideas with key players, and influence the decisions that will ultimately lead to success.
Visualization
In the majority of Business Intelligence implementations the end product is represented by some sort of visualization; charts, graphs and reports either presented separately or combined in what is known as a dashboard.
To date, much of the results here have been quite a long way below par. This is for two reasons. The first is that software vendors and users alike have largely been ignorant of the findings from scientific research into visual cognition. And secondly, they have been pre-occupied with fashion rather than purpose.
Research into how human understanding and memory is impacted by visual perception, has been going on for forty years and our appreciation of how our abilities work continues to develop. However, there are already many aspects that we can be quite sure about.
The work done by people like John Tukey, Edward Tufte and more recently Stephen Few, specifically in the area of data visualization, has given us a set of concepts to make the speed of understanding and the ability to retain information significantly more likely.
However, most Business Intelligence software tends to result in garish, over-crowded and clumsy visualizations which ironically end up hindering our understanding rather than helping it. And the main fashion inspired faux pas mentioned above, comes from an absolutely brilliant piece of misinterpretation.
The dashboard originated from the idea of having a live presentation of information, very much like a pilot or racing car driver might have. So it really isn’t surprising that the resulting instructions to software designers produced some rather beautifully rendered representations of speedometer dials.
While these can look highly appealing, they provide very little information compared to the space which they occupy; they are hopeless at showing the comparative results so important in the management of performance; and they fly in the face of all research into how to present data in ways that are easily understood and remembered.
The new generation of BI software is much more tuned into best practice when it comes to data visualization. Chart choices and colour combinations are automatically made in ways that optimise comprehension.
It should be pointed out that this ease of visualization is as important during the process of analysis as it is in the final presentation. Good analysis usually requires taking several stabs at the data and the ability to quickly understand what is going on during the process of interrogation is essential if user engagement is to be maintained.
The improvement that the new BI software vendors have made in visualization capability is one of the major reasons for the wider adoption of Business Intelligence today.
Services
Attova's consultants specialise in working with clients to taking a modular approach to harnessing visualization acoss all layers of the business.
Core Competencies:
• Data visualization, business analytics.
• Compression, management and delivery of big data.
• Building tools to spot patterns in datasets.
• Automatic pattern recognition, signal extraction from data.
Use Cases:
• Risk Analysis
• Trading & Execution
• Compliance & Fraud
• Performance & Attribution
• Research & Sales
• Latency Monitoring
