Many Eyes are better than one!
What is the future of visual analytics? Many would suggest you’d need an army of data scientists and extensive investment in hardware and software to find out. Not so! With the re-vamp of IBM Many Eyes to deliver a broader selection of visualization techniques, IBM is once again giving the ability to derive insight from data, to the masses.
When it comes to finding nuggets of insight hidden in sheets of data, many eyes are always better than one!
Man & Machine Teaming for Insight with SPSS
In 1997, Garry Kasparov, a human, famously lost a chess game to IBM Deep Blue, a machine. There-in started the age of “Man vs Machine” – a hot topic for many boardroom debates and box office movies. What many may not know, is the events that transpired in a freestyle chess tournament held in 2005. Neither Man nor Machine took home the title, it was in fact two men and a machine working in cooperation that reigned supreme and took home the title.
In Shyam Sankar‘s TED presentation “The rise of human-computer cooperation“, he so rightly points out that “brute computing force alone can’t solve the world’s problems“. Least of all, the world’s analytical problems. Which is why Man and Machine must team to drive greater insight.
Analytics in Sport: Making the Invisible, Visible
This post is inspired by my beloved Essendon Bombers. Who, after showing significant promise at the start of the season beating the top contenders for the championship, have since suffered injury after injury after injury, with nothing short of humiliating defeats in the lead up to the finals.
Analytics in the world of sport is not a new concept, and yet many teams are still to realise its full potential. Much like the world of business, sporting teams around the world are looking to analytics to make the patterns and trends in human performance and game strategy that may be invisible to the human eye, visible.
The Beauty of Data
Every now and then you need to take a moment to stop and smell the roses. And this blog is no different – a short break from the world of business, this post is about the beauty of data visualisations and how, through imagination and creativity, they can tell a story.
Instant Insight: My 10 minute Cognos challenge
Today I set myself a challenge: How much insight could I get from a data set that is foreign to me in under 10 minutes?
Would it be enough time to evaluate the physical data file, understand structures, formats, columns, names etc? Would it be enough time to rank, sort, group, slice? But most importantly, would I be able to not only understand the data, but draw conclusions about what it represents?
Armed with a phantom data set and IBM Cognos Insight, I started the clock!
Puzzling Context: The importance of seeing the whole picture
The skies are blue, the sun is shining, and if that isn’t enough to make your smile, it also happens to be a public holiday today. In celebration of The Queen’s birthday, I am….cleaning the house?!
In a flurry of washing, tidying, organising, cleaning, wiping, toilet training (my two year old, not me), I stumbled across something which filled me with fear – the dreaded lone jigsaw puzzle piece! This is not just a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle, it’s the determining factor as to whether a quiet rainy afternoon spent indoors will end in giggles or tears, and therefore it must find a way back to its rightful location.
Herein lies the problem, what jigsaw puzzle does it belong to?
The Yin Yang of BI
If my customers were to describe me using a single word it would be: “passionate“. And there is nothing that brings out the fire more so than hearing comments like: “It doesn’t matter what BI tool we choose, just get the data right.” or “The data warehouse is taking too long to build, just give them access to what you have.” The former is more common amongst IT and consultants, and the latter, a common view of business groups.
It was 10 years ago when I was first introduced the importance of balancing quality information with useful visualisation, which is why I’m amazed companies today still work with unbalanced solutions. It’s what I call the “Yin yang of BI”. Contrary to popular belief, Yin yang are not opposing forces like good and evil, but complementary opposites that interact within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system.
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