This a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft titled "What's New in BI." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft.
Mark Flaherty: Let’s look at one example of an advanced visualization, so you can see what is meant by more insight per pixel. Think of a regular gauge chart. It’s very familiar. Some people would call this the executive eye candy. Everyone likes to see this in a dashboard because we’re familiar with the idea of the speedometer style gauge. So if the needle is either in red or yellow then we’re below target for something.
Now the challenge with this is this single gauge is taking up a lot of space. The other problem is 10% of the population is color blind. So is that the red on the right or the green? One solution to this problem is the bullet graph. This does a couple of things. First, it doesn’t rely on the red-yellow-green so everyone can make sense of it.
Instead it uses different shading so the equivalent of the red is the left hand side of the bar. The medium gray bar in the middle is the target, and the dark circle is the actual. Also, bullet graphs take up less room, so you can fit several in a single screen. So obviously you’re getting more information per pixel.
Advanced visualization would be consider immature in terms of pervasiveness in the total BI software market, and the market is highly fragmented. But there is really high value for that time to insight and discovery. It’s mainly business analysts and power users who are authoring these, but of course managers and casual users can consume them. So this is an innovation you should evaluate.
Here's another example using four dimensions, adding size and color to the tradtional 2-dimensional x-y graph.
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