Eric Kavanagh: Yeah. And I think one of the reasons that I list it in the abstract is that data visualized is more powerful in being able to persuade people. You can just more quickly and easily assimilate something about a set of information if you see it visually.
I mean sometimes numbers are obvious if you have one million versus 10. Everybody knows that a million is a whole lot more than 10. But in all kinds of complex datasets I think it's much easier to visualize the data using not just the traditional things like bars and pie charts and so on and so forth but some of the more advanced mechanisms for visualizing data.
It seems to me that can be a very strong argument when trying to convince a colleague and even someone who may not share your language as their first language if you are dealing with a multinational organization. I am guessing that some of these effective uses of data visualization will be better for persuading people who are not in your own country, right?
Mark Madsen: Yeah. I think that’s one of the shifts in -- well it's not even a shift, people have always used this information for these purposes because you don’t make organizational decisions in a vacuum. You typically have to convince other people that your definition of the problem, your understanding of the problem is right, but then you have to go on to convince people to take an action.
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And so the old model of BI was this publishing, saying, well here it is and then PowerPoint and Excel and things like that became the means to deliver it. And that environment was really great for explanation. It was great for things where you have known bounds because the exploration was already done for you by some IT analyst, who modeled the data and built a metadata layer in a particular way so, the known question, known bounds of the data for the answer.Then we get into the exploration which you didn’t really touch on there where visualization can enable that. And then you explore it. You explain it. You have got to educate people going from here it is to here is how it works and why we need to take an action, to persuasion: to this is the action I think we should take.
It’s a kind of a biased version of educating people. And the visual mechanisms for doing that, especially when they are interactive and dynamic, when somebody asks you yes, but what about pointed sticks? You can come back to them and say, well yes, pointed sticks are covered over here and show them as opposed to having to anticipate everything in a PowerPoint.
Eric Kavanagh: Yeah, that’s a good point. Well hey, let's bring in Rich Penkowski of Deloitte. Welcome back to DM Radio.
Rich Penkowski: Hey Eric, it's good to be with you again. Mark, good to see you again, as well.
Mark Madsen: Yes.
Eric Kavanagh: Yeah. So Rich, you obviously deal a lot with data visualization when trying to help your clients, when trying to make presentations yourself to persuade people to see the world the way you see it. What are some of the more compelling reasons in your opinion why data visualization is so important?
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Rich Penkowski: Well you know Eric, I think actually that the conversation you and Mark have been having has been excellent because really there is a lot of science around why people are reacting to visualization the way they are. If you really think about the static tabular approach that most organizations use to portray data, it actually runs counter to fundamental patterns of human thinking.
I mean our brains, since birth, really have been tuned to recognize shapes, detect movement and use touch to explore surroundings and make their connection. So a lot of organizations really struggle with unlocking the true value from their BI investment because they are actually portraying data in that static way when in reality that is in many cases the hardest way for the brain to consume, understand and interpret the information that’s trying to be portrayed.
I think when you add on to that the notion that more and more of the organizations that I have had an opportunity to work with are really trying to sort of not only look at and visualize the information that is within the four walls of their enterprise, but they are also now trying to incorporate loads of unstructured data, right, whether that comes from internal emails, external emails, instant messages, tweets.
And in the face of so many loose connections like that and the kind of non-intuitive correlations, visualization is really the only technique you can use to really derive value from bringing that information together and to look for trends and patterns. And so I think what we are seeing here kind of has been long in the making, right, and I think we are all I think really enjoying this opportunity to see technology catch up to sort of the way the human mind needs to look at and interpret information. And we are really I think at the beginning of a pretty major wave of change in the way companies evaluate data.