BI Scorecard Blog

What’s in a Story (and a Name)?

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Story telling capabilities are fast becoming table stakes in visual data discovery tools, but not all stories and storyboards are the same. Here's a look a look at four vendors' approaches.

It would be nice to think that most data analyses end with a value added decision or action. But really, many BI analyses end with a Power Point, finely tuned for board room presentations. Data is explored, analyzed, filtered, transformed, and then exported into a story telling medium where it becomes static. The PowerPoint may be used to support or refute a hypothesis or to provide a status update.

But what if that same data could remain within the BI tool, with board room presentation quality? Could those meetings of death by PowerPoint become more effective, interactive work sessions? Can the data be better presented not only to support a hypothesis, but also, to guide a decision-maker to a logical conclusion that compels action? This is the vision behind recent innovations in a number of visual data discovery tools. Tableau and Qlik call them story points and storytelling, respectively, SAP calls it storyboards and infographics. SAS, meanwhile, brings live integration within Power Point itself. While each vendor's feature has slightly similar names, the capabilities differ greatly.

Tableau: Story Points

Tableau released the concept of Story Points in version 8.2 in June this year. With a story, a user can insert a visualization onto a canvas, with the saved filters. The idea of story points is to provide users with the ability to present the data as a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. The banner of the canvas can include a long-text that is clickable. For example, in the below story, "Profits are increasing" is a clickable title. Multiple visualizations can be linked together to create a PowerPoint-like slide show. Within each page, users can adjust the filters. "The data tells you what's happening, but the story guides you to an understanding of why," Tableau says in its white paper, "Data Storytelling."

Qlik: Story Telling

Qlik Sense Desktop was released in July 2014 as a free, desktop visual discovery tool based on the vendor's next-generation interface. The vendor has not announced release data for Qlik Sense for the enterprise, currently in beta. In Qlik Sense Desktop, dashboards and individual visualization can be added to a story. Compared to Tableau, Qlik Sense has a few more bells and whistles to its stories. First, each page of the story can contain multiple visualizations and/or snapshotted images, with the drill point and filters saved. Also, there is an "effect" option that automatically recolors a chart so top (or bottom) performers stand out (in the below image, higher salaries are highlighted). Additional text can be added to the story, whether a simple annotation or a full paragraph. Images and shapes can also be added to the canvas to create a type of infographic. In play mode, each slide nicely transitions to the next. Dashboards remain interactive.

SAP Lumira: Storyboards and Infographics

Earlier this year, SAP added the concept of storyboards to Lumira. While the name may suggest similar capabilities to Tableau and Qlik story telling, in SAP, storyboards are better described as dashboards with multiple visualizations on a single page. Up until that release, Lumira lacked the ability to create these simple dashboards, a capability in most other visual data discovery tools. In addition to visualizations and filters, Lumira storyboards also support text boxes for titles or paragraphs, and images.

Meanwhile, in version 16, released in June this year, SAP added infographics— the ability to add pictograms and shapes to the storyboards. As shown below, there is also a preview ability to see how the infographic will appear on various devices. With infographics, users can also set the color options for the images, background, and some charts. This, of course, should be an expected feature in any BI tool but was lacking in earlier Lumira releases. The infographic capability is an interesting concept, but I found the capabilities too immature to replace PowerPoint. For example, in trying to add a callout, the callout does not natively support text; the text has to be added in a separate text box. As well, the callout pointer cannot be repositioned to connect to the particular image or outlier within the chart.

SAS Visual Analytics: Power Point

The SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office is a little-known but powerful add-in that lets users access and interact with BI content directly from within Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. With this approach, users create a visualization within SAS Visual Analytics. Then within PowerPoint, there is a Visual Analytics toolbar that lets them insert the visualization onto the PowerPoint canvas. The visualization is a direct query, not a static export, so it can be refreshed. Users have all the PowerPoint abilities to add text and additional images.

Stories: More to come?

While each of these innovations goes by a similar sounding name, the capabilities differ. All reflect a growing trend of how to better present data, findings, and inflection points into a cohesive story. I suspect story capabilities will continue to emerge in other visual data discovery tools. Like any first novel, I suspect the second releases of these stories will only improving over time.

 

Definitions

Dashboards: multiple visual indicators on a single page

Infographic: visual representation of information, used beyond quantitative data such as in subway maps, weather patterns, and so on

Story: collection of thoughts with a beginning, middle and end

Visual Data Discovery: More than a Pretty Face?

Visual data discovery seems to be all the rage this year, with new products and high-growth companies. What’s driving this interest – the pretty pictures or the self-service? And will this new category of tools finally take BI mainstream or are we simply trading spreadsheet chaos for
another kind of chaos?

There is still a fair amount of confusion about what is visual data discovery and what it is not, so I’ll start with a definition:

Visual Data Discovery tools speed the time to insight through the use of visualizations, best practices in visual perception, and easy exploration. Such tools support business agility and self-service BI through a variety of innovations that may include in-memory processing and mashing of multiple data sources.

Some befuddled BI teams though are shrugging their shoulders, and asking, “Isn’t that what ad hoc business queries were supposed to do?” Well, yes, to a degree. Two of the biggest differences in business query tools and visual data discovery tools are the use of graphs and the degree of user autonomy. In a business query tool, a user can certainly add a bar chart to a dense page of numbers. But the chart is an after-thought.  In fact, according to a TDWI survey last year, users spend two-thirds of their time analyzing data in tabular versus chart form. This may be appropriate when you need a precise number (“how many widgets do we have on hand?”), but not when you are trying to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies. With visual data discovery tools, the query and visualization process are one in the same. Drag a time period onto the page and up pops a trend line. Add a product category, and perhaps that trend line is now automatically converted to a trellis or small multiple chart. Research has shown that when data is represented graphically, we use less cognitive resources to make a decision and retain information better. So these graphs are more than just pretty or engaging; it’s about speeding the time to insight.

The other big distinction with visual data discovery tools from business query tools is the degree of user autonomy. Business query tools generally require a meta data layer that IT will often design and build. This meta data layer provides a layer of abstraction from the physical database schema, with potentially hundreds of tables. With a visual data discovery tool, business users are often working with a subset of data, either a flat file or spreadsheet, so IT is not a bottleneck. If a real-time query is involved, the visual data discovery tool may automatically model a meta data layer, giving its best guess at what’s a metric and what’s a dimension, again with little to no IT support. Somebody would have to write the SQL for the initial query and define the joins, but once extracted, the data is often loaded into an in-memory engine. (See BI Scorecard’s Visual Discovery evaluation framework for detailed features to consider.)

If the pretty pictures and degree of business autonomy make you want to rush to buy these tools and throw out your business query tool, keep in mind that there are gaps the visual data discovery tools don’t fill (yet?): many are desktop authoring and don’t work as well with multiple fact tables in a single query, for example. Others provide a high degree of interactivity and exploration on the desktop, but not on the Web so just how to share analyses is a work in progress for some products. So right now, I recommend companies add visual data discovery tools to their BI tool portfolio and view them as a complement to the business query module. Time will tell if the modules fully converge.

Wait! Haven’t we been here before with desktop OLAP tools? The industry pendulum does seem to be swinging back to the late 1990s – think Microsoft Analysis Services, Cognos Power Play, Essbase, TM1, all with their beautiful, highly visual front ends (Proclarity, Wired for OLAP, Executive Viewer to name a few). These departmental initiatives grew into chaos, so the desktop OLAP tools became enterprise grade … and IT once-again became a bottle neck.

The visual data discovery vendors, then, should take note of history:  The more successful products and vendors will empower users without overwhelming them. The tools will be agile while also being scalable. And the savvy IT departments will embrace them rather than run from them. After all, in this era, it’s survival of the smartest and the fastest, not the perfectly controlled and architected.

How important is visual data discovery in your organization? Take the Successful BI Survey here.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

QlikTech Shares Future Product Plans for QlikView

Last week, at its annual partner summit in Miami Beach, Florida, QlikTech laid out its themes for its future product release, currently dubbed QlikView.next.

Over 900 partners were in attendance at the vendor’s annual conference. It is however, the first time that QlikTech invited key analysts to the event, a reflection of both the organization’s growing prominence in the BI space, but also, the vendor’s maturing organization in its ability to respond to requests for information and constructive criticism.

In some respects, the conference was also a who’s who in the BI industry as a number of long-time industry veteran’s have flocked to this fast-growing vendor, in part a reflection of the brain drain at other companies, and in part a reflection of QlikTech’s attracting top talent in the BI space.

Donald Farmer, formerly of Microsoft and now VP of Product Management at QlikTech laid out five themes in the next QlikView product release: gorgeous and genius, collaboration, mobile and agile, open platform, and enterprise ready. While I have worked with Donald in his past role at Microsoft and he’s participated in some TDWI bake-offs, it’s the first time I have heard him deliver a keynote. I was impressed by how inspiring he was, with a rare ability to convey abstract, potentially mundane technical concepts with humor and insight.  For example, in talking about the goal of making QlikView both gorgeous and genius (terms not typically applied to a BI tool), he compared QlikView to Hedy Lamarr, a classic beauty and MGM actress who also invented wireless communications technology.

While QlikView 11 is primarily IT-developed applications and dashboards, the demo of QlikView.next had a greater concept of business-user assembled dashboards. QlikView 11 introduced collaborative features (see the BI Scorecard in-depth review) but QlikTech wants to make collaboration more pervasive in the next release.

With the ongoing uptake in tablet devices (Apple sold 3 million iPad3s in the first three days of that product launch), it’s not surprising that mobility is a key theme for the next release. What was surprising, though, is that QlikTech gave a nod to Windows 8 impact on both the desktop experience and mobile, whereas most other BI vendors seem to have largely dismissed Microsoft’s influence on mobile.

As QlikTech has grown as a company and QlikView applications have grown in scale, QlikView.next will bring more open API’s for partners to develop applications. It was noteworthy that this was the first partner conference that included an exhibit hall of technology partners such as Panopticon and Expressor. The Panopiticon integration, for example, brings real-time streaming into a QlikView dashboard. The Expressor and Informatica integration brings data integration and more robust ETL than what is currently available in the QlikView scripts.  Other planned improvements to enterprise administration include better tools for IT to manage large QlikView applications.

Noticeably absent from QlikTech’s future product strategy were plans for cloud or big-data, at least in terms of Hadoop integration—scalability of QlikView applications was a theme in a number of track sessions.

QlikTech’s partner network, with numerous resellers that account for half the company’s revenues, is a competitive differentiator versus chief competitor Tableau, who only recently began focusing on growing such a network. It also is a differentiator versus mega BI vendors who have often failed to nurture such relationships, particularly post industry consolidation. As one partner said at this conference, “with SAP we are a pawn, and they are the king. With QlikTech it’s (the relationship is) direct, fair, and customer centric.”

 

Tableau 6.0 and Cool BI at TDWI

At TDWI this month in my Cool BI class, Tableau Software previewed its just-released 6.0 version. This may prove to be one of the company’s biggest releases and one that heightens the competition with QlikTech, TIBCO Spotfire, and Microsoft PowerPivot.

As I wrote in a recent in-depth review of Tableau, this visual discovery tool is one of the easiest to use. For customers with a well-designed data warehouse or data mart, Tableau Software nicely leverages the power of the underlying database, whether relational, OLAP, or columnar. This approach was in stark contrast to QlikTech QlikView’s and Tibco Spotfire’s approach of bringing all the data into memory. Replicating the data can has its advantages and disadvantages. With Tableau 6.0, customers seem to now get the best of both worlds with the new Data Engine. Tableau’s Data Engine promises to leverage the source database when necessary or to bring portions of the data into memory when that offers the better performance. New support for Windows 64-bit improves the product’s scalability.

The other major improvement is in the ability to handle multiple data sources, a capability referred to as Data Blending. This was one of the oft-cited reasons why customers would choose other products over Tableau. With Data Blending, an end user can drag and drop new data sources onto a visualization. As long as the dimension names are conformed, the tool will automatically create the joins.

In the Cool BI class, it was interesting to see so many users who have heard of Tableau but only a few who actually used it. I suspect these latest enhancements will change that.

At the end of the class, I once again asked the 50 or so attendees to vote on their top 3 innovations out of the 8 we reviewed. Dashboards and advanced visualization once again topped the list of priorities for innovations attendees most want to pursue. But here’s the rub: BI users would like these capabilities to be in one tool and currently, it’s a fragmented market. Some advanced visualization products can be used to create dashboards but not all;  and not all dashboards support visual discovery.

Predictive analytics came out second. In discussing the integration of BI with predictive analytics, SAS demoed its new Rapid Predictive Modeler.  The third highest priority was a split between BI Search, with Endeca demoing its solution, and in-memory analytics, a capability gaining momentum across the industry.

I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving this week and safe travels! I’m thankful for having an amazing job that connects me to so many wonderful customers, readers, colleagues, and vendors with cool products! To my family and friends, thank you … for everything.

Best wishes,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

www.BIScorecard.com

 

Advanced Visualization Moves to Top of Mind at TDWI

I’m just back from sunny San Diego from the TDWI conference. That everyone stays in the classes all day, rather than exploring the tempting water front, always impresses (and surprizes) me!

I briefly visited the Executive Summit to hear about what trends CIOs and VPs of Business Intelligence think will have the biggest impact over the next three years. Predictive analytics once again topped the list, but now in the second highest spot was advanced visualization and discovery.  This is good news for vendors/products such as Tableau, Spotfire, SAS JMP, and Advizor Solutions. This week we published an in-depth evaluation of TIBCO Spotfire that highlights the product’s strengths, challenges, and competitive differentiators.

Surprizing to me, though, was no mention of in-memory, but I am chalking this up to an oversight in the list of voting items rather than any real indication of its importance.  Mobile BI ranked near the bottom again, but as one retailer commented, that result will look very different in a year from now given how fast iPads are selling. Juicing up the competitiveness in this market too is new support for Flash on Droid smartphones.

The BI Bake Off was once again exciting and nerve wracking (for me as the facilitator!), with Information Builders, MicroStrategy, and Oracle demoing side-by-side. It was the first look for many Oracle prospects to see OBI EE 11g which officially went production last week. I know-- everyone wants to know who won the bake off and where the vendors were on par with one another.  But I have to save that result for attendees only!

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Cool BI from TDWI

I’m just back from sunny, warm, Florida, venue for TDWI’s fall conference. The brightest spot from this  conference, is that it was one of the best attended of the year. I hope it is a sign of recovery, at least in the BI world!

I had the honor of delivering the key note on Monday, with new findings on secrets to successful BI (details to follow next week), but I first wanted to share some insights from my Cool BI Course.

It is a fun course for me to teach, something I compare to a wine tasting of eight new innovations (but without the hangover!), with mini demos performed by trail-blazing vendors and some by me. So fun, but, yes, stressful too! People are most excited about advanced visualization and dashboards, with Tableau demonstrating these capabilities (in May, search and rich reportlets were higher) . To be fair, some of the results may be slanted by how well either I or the vendor explained the innovation, the benefits, and the maturity.

While SaaS got few votes here, the demo by Birst certainly gets my vote for most leading edge. In some respects, the demo went so smoothly that I suspect the complexities of what was being demoed live weren’t apparent.  Just this week, Birst announced Live Access, a new ability in Birst 4 that allows the SaaS BI layer to reach into the on-premise data and present it with the hosted data. So CEO Brad Peters demoed loading data from a local spreadsheet to the cloud, combining it with SalesForce.com data, and finally in real-time, with data from an on-premise data mart, all in a matter of minutes (he quipped my timing requirements were rather demanding, but hey, we have a class schedule to keep!).  I’ve seen SaaS BI products do the first part, even the first two parts, but never all three together. It brings a new level of flexibility to SaaS BI, and takes away the argument against SaaS BI that companies are fearful of letting go of their data.

Let me know if you too think this is pretty leading edge, or if you’ve seen other products pull data from all three environments with such ease.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

Can BI Help Battle Swine Flu?

If you have school-bound children as I do, no doubt you are reading the headlines of swine flu wondering how you, your children,  your company will battle this year’s flu season now that school is back in session.  It’s the highly contagious, seemingly unavoidable aspect of swine flu that worries me. When you own your own company, there is no such thing as “paid sick days.”

Business intelligence is helping monitor swine flu in a number of ways. Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) operates hospital emergency rooms in northern New Jersey and New York metro area. They have a relatively unique ability to collect patient data across multiple hospitals, on a daily basis, and then analyze it with SAP BusinessObjects (see graph).  (The red line refers to 3 times standard deviation, yellow is 2 times.) I have previously written about EMA in my book Successful Business Intelligence, because of the unique ways they use BI to to improve patient care and manage costs. You can catch a glimpse of how they are now using BI to identify swine flu outbreaks in this video.

At the CDC, hospitals and other centers report data on a weekly basis so there is a lag in knowing when an outbreak is occurring. That New Jersey, my home, has one of the highest pediatric death rates is alarming. But that’s all I know, and yet, I have no doubt the data could tell us so much more.

Knowing an outbreak is occurring is helpful. However, identifying the patterns in who contracted it, where, when, and the severity, would be even more helpful. This is where advanced visualization tools fit in. While much of BI lets us answer questions that we know to ask (who, where, how many), advanced visualization tools allow for more exploratory type questions such as:

·         What characteristics do these people have in common?

·         Are they football players?

·         More boys than girls showing symptoms?

·         Does Mrs. Smith’s class have more unusual absences than Mrs. Kane’s?

I wish our town, our school, or even parents like myself could ask and answer these questions. In many cases, the data is there, but without the tools in place to explore the data, it’s not actionable.

For an evaluation framework of advanced visualization tools, you can download a new BI Scorecard template here (visitor login required).  Also, I highly recommend visualization expert Stephen Few’s latest book and this article by Seth Grimes.

So while much of the country awaits the release of the new flu vaccine, I’d like to see our schools and hospitals add BI to its arsenal of tools for battling an outbreak.

Regards,

Cindi Howson,

Founder, BI Scorecard

Fun BI Holiday Shopping App

It’s true – I love these viral marketing apps from BI vendors that are not only fun to test drive, but also, practical! So to celebrate the holiday season, visualization and analytic vendor TIBCO Spotfire has created this fun holiday gift finder (warning, unless you want the continuous jingle tune to draw the ire of co-workers, set your volume to low).

According to Spotfire, the data in the gift finder is based on data from Amazon and includes prices, popularity rankings, and ratings for a subset of product categories. As I wrote in the recent Intelligent Enterprise feature article, users can see the value of in-memory analytics in action here as you interact with data visually.

On the “Shop” tab, you can view a bar chart of products grouped by price and readily filter them by product rating and category. What I found interesting was the “Analyze tab” in which you can see what is most popular by price. So while there are some stereotypes about ladies being big spenders, I thought it was revealing that the most popular high-end gifts are the typical “male toys” – TVs! (Tip: lasso around the dots to see a list of products in the bottom pane that then link back to Amazon.).  And when I filter by rating, it’s not the Sony I got my husband a few years ago, it’s the Samsungs!

But as we are all tightening the budget this year, I was curious about the most popular jewelry items with a high rating but in the lower price end.  I stumbled across these nice earrings for $155 to discover they are now on sale for $59. Maybe this gift finder is more than a fun demo after all.

Merry Christmas!

Cindi

Founder, BIScorecard, a resource for in-depth BI product reviews

Author, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App