After spending some time focusing on articles around Business Intelligence such as “BI has hit the wall” and “Old BI and the Challenge of Analytics”, I thought I would direct you to some winning entries from Malofiej 19, an international competition and summit dedicated to journalistic infographics where Stephen Few was a judge. In Pictures of the News: Malofiej 19 in Review the top three winners are presented and are visually inspirational. Two of the winners are maps which hold a place dear to my heart, having designed maps and as a collector of maps.

Best Map: National Geographic, for “Rivers of the World,” a gorgeous map of the world’s rivers and lakes.

Best of Show (print): National Geographic, for “Gulf of Mexico: A Geography of Offshore Oil,” the story of oil drilling and drilling rights, primarily along the coast of Louisiana.

And my favourite, is a compelling video about Mariano Rivera pitching.

Best of Show (online): New York Times, for its demonstration of Mariano Rivera’s unique pitching style, titled “How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters.” Take the time to watch this amazing combination of narration and motion graphics.

One award that wasn’t mentioned (but in my opinion should have been) in Stephen Few’s blog is Oil Spill: Tracking the Spill in the Gulf which won gold for online breaking news by the New York Times. A step by step visual that details the progression of the oil spill very effectively without attempting to be too flashy.

For a complete list of all of the awards check out Infographics News.

And as an added bonus there is Stephen Few’s presentation from the summit entitled “Infographics and the Brain: Designing Graphics to Inform.”

By Bertrand

In 2007 the three giants of Business Intelligence were all bought in multi-billion dollar deals:

• Oracle buys Hyperion for $3.3 billion
• SAP buys Business Objects for $6.78 billion
• IBM buys Cognos for $4.9 Billion

Since these giants made their big splash in the waters of BI, what’s changed?

Well, according to Stephen Few in his blog “Old BI and the Challenge of Analytics” we’re on a “faster trip to nowhere”. Stephen continues to demand more than infrastructure from the big BI vendors. “Big, old, traditional BI companies are good at producing technologies that enhance the infrastructure of business intelligence—more and faster—but not the actual use of data in ways that lead to greater intelligence. Being big, focused primarily on technology from an [software] engineering perspective, and devoutly sales driven makes it difficult for companies like SAP to develop useful tools for activities that support decision making: data exploration, sensemaking, and communication. To meet this challenge, they must shift their focus from technology to the humans who use it… Will SAP and other big vendors find their way into the analytics age? If so, will they do it in time, or will analytics become the exclusive realm of smaller and more agile vendors, leaving traditional BI companies in the back room to maintain the infrastructure (data collection, transformation, cleansing, warehousing, and production reporting)?”

At VISAGE, we strive to be one of those smaller and more agile vendors that Stephen speaks of who will rally the call for human focused technology that enables data exploration, sensemaking, and communication!

By Bertrand

My favourite blogger in the BI industry is Stephen Few, founder of Perceptual Edge. With 25 years of experience as an innovator, consultant, and an educator in the fields of business intelligence and information design, he is a leading expert in data visualization for data sense-making and communication. You can read more about Stephen at www.perceptualedge.com. What I admire the most about Stephen’s writing is that he’s a straight shooter, with clear points and an honest critique. One of my favourite blog posts, and one that is relevant for Energy producers is “BI has hit the wall” which is focused around the image below. The problem that Stephen speaks to is prevalent in many offices in Calgary where “…the BI industry still focuses on collecting, cleaning, transforming, integrating, storing, and reporting data, but the activities that actually make sense of information and use it to support better decisions have remained behind a wall that they’ve failed to scale and have never seriously tried to scale. For data to be useful, we must explore it, analyse it, communicate it, monitor it, and use it … To use the data that we’ve amassed, a human-centric, design-oriented perspective and skill set is needed… The software vendors that are providing effective data sensemaking solutions – those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall – have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace.”

Thank you Stephen few for so clearly articulating the need for BI (and visual analytics) to reinvent itself for the end users.

By Bertrand

While Business Intelligence (BI) has been around for many years, the term is not often used in the Oil and Gas industry bybusiness users (engineers, operators and managers). However, energy producers have very specific needs centered around time series data (i.e. a need to see how production, pressures, costs etc. trend over time), this is where BI comes in.

Recently TDWI published the article 11 Big-Data Analytics Predictions for 2011. TDWI’s (The Data Warehouse Institute) Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing articles can be a source of insight into how the industry of BI is evolving.

One of the most notable items in Ketan Karia’s article is “10. Self-serve BI gets more attention“. Self-service BI directly hits home for business users on the front lines who count on information and insights in the reports they create for managers and board members, among others. The intervention of IT still delays getting data to these users. Many enterprises still have to run a myriad of customized reports that cause huge backlog. Users are frustrated. In 2011, companies will have to accelerate report delivery … Users want insights in moments, not the hours it takes with traditional BI solutions currently available.”

The reason BI tools are not more pervasive in the energy industry is that they have not met the needs of engineers, operators and managers to “self-serve” (get at the data they want to see when they want to see it). We’re happy to see that the BI industry is recognizing the importance of this and that VISAGE is at the forefront. Read the blog post “BI has hit the wall” to learn more.

By Bertrand