This is the transcript of DM Radio’s program titled “The Eyes Have It: Ten Reasons Why Data Visualization Rocks.”
Eric Kavanagh: Once again, this is DM Radio. Yes indeed, my name is Eric Kavanagh, and I will be your humble, if excitable, host for the show that is designed after all to peel away the marketing veneer so we can get down to brass tacks and figure out what is going on here in the field of information management.
And obviously folks, there is a lot going on. It is the information age. And the topic we are going to talk about today is that last mile of the whole data management process arguably. We are going to talk about data visualization. So we are trying to be trendy here and thus the title is, the Eyes Have It: 10 Reasons Why Data Visualization Rocks.
We are very pleased to have an all-star cast for you today. First of all, a quick nod to our sponsor. Today’s episode of DM Radio is brought to you by Tableau Software. Hop online for more information about those folks. We have an all-star cast lined up.
Jim Ericson is in a meeting today so our usual co-host won't be with us but he sends his best wishes, and I am sure he will be checking the show out later. But we have our very own Mark Madsen on the show today. Mark Madsen of Third Nature is going to be our guest host along with Rich Penkowski of Deloitte. We will also be hearing from Doug Cogswell of ADVIZOR Solutions, Suzanne Hoffman of Tableau, and Byron Igoe of InetSoft.
So a couple quick notes, we tweet with a hashtag @DM Radio. Please do not be shy. Go ahead, and tweet during the show. I see a number of good tweets up there already. Feel free to tweet your questions as well for our guests and we will try to get to those during the course of the program. So with that, let's bring in our expert guest host of the day, Mark Madsen of Third Nature. Welcome back to DM Radio.
Mark Madsen: Hi Eric. Thanks for having me back.
Eric Kavanagh: Oh absolutely. So what's your favorite reason for why data visualization rocks?
Mark Madsen: I don’t know. I think to start with, it's just the shift from data and BI as this kind of static model of presentation to something that’s interactive. When you think about BI and the Data Viz that is embedded in BI, it's like graphs and charts. It's very static. It's kind of like the way we used to do word processing where you typed your words, and then you formatted them after the fact. BI is kind of like typesetting for numbers, and the interaction of the Data Viz tool changes that.
Eric Kavanagh: I like that. That’s a very good analogy. So I mean there are lot of factors that kind of came into this to making that happen. I mean we are seeing in the last few years visualization tools that are much more interactive, I guess one reason being that you can pull more data in that just sits underneath the surface there, and it allows you to kind of drill around. I mean I think of things like slider bars, for example, are some of my favorite tools for being able to create a truly multidimensional view of data as opposed to just the sort of two-dimensional view of a spreadsheet or other kinds of things like that, right.
Mark Madsen: Right. Actually a spreadsheet is a great example. There is a difference -- when you think about spreadsheets, there is actually a good thing about spreadsheets. There, what you see is what you get. If you change a number of formula on a spreadsheet it's there in front of you, and it changes; there is physicality to the data.
And in the BI environments, these environments are very design, save, run, view models, right. You get to design a query or drag some numbers on then you have to save and execute the thing, and then you get the results back. It's the old sort of batchy interaction model. It's very broken for somebody who is trying to work with a train of thought. And I think that’s one of those things that’s changed. It makes data, it makes information a lot more tangible to a person than the conventional tool designs that we have worked with.
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