Wednesday, September 17, 2008
A few weeks ago the NY Times ran an interesting piece on Sunday titled; Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data
- I thought I would start my first blog with a comment about this
article – it was well written and touched on a number of key issues
this blog will focus on; technology, design, collaboration, current
events and oh yes people. I think it is important to give credit so let
me call out Anne Eisenberg for discovering and then writing a brilliant
piece on Many Eyes (www.many-eyes.com).
This website/technology was created by researchers at IBM – really it
is super cool – the purpose of the technology is – get this – allow
people to publish and discuss data visualization collaboratively! What
a novel idea to have more than one viewpoint when it comes to looking
at complex data.
In
business, managers at all levels can convince ourselves of what we want
to see – sometimes this can lead to adverse outcomes. In any situation
where someone is making a decision impacting where to market, sell or
conduct some level of business; getting buy in from a team tends to
make a better decision. We do this all the time at our company –
circulating information in the form of email to get opinions. Now
imagine if you could also bolster your position by showing a picture –
in this case it really is worth a 1000 words. The Many-Eyes site does
just this - allows for a different perspective – graphically present
your data so that others can form opinions and review from different
angles. As was stated so eloquently in the article; “I might find one
thing; someone else, something completely different, and that’s where
the conversation starts.” Great point about business – we need more
collaboration at the people level – bring everyone into the discussion and let’s see what we start to hear – it is time for the conversation to start!
Don’t
get me wrong there is nothing wrong with sitting down and looking at a
spreadsheet and doing the heavy lifting on crunching some data. But
after you have done this work and you want opinions from various
avenues – visualization is a great way to go. As a society we have this
great tool called the internet where we can get data with a couple of
key strokes – maybe even too much data; now imagine taking this data,
painting a rich picture and asking for opinions from experts around the
world – now we truly have received a gift.
How
many people read USA Today? I can remember the first time USA Today was
published while I was in college and I said wow – look at this really
cool newspaper. The map on the back of the first page graphically
called out weather across the nation – now for the first time business
travelers could see what it was like in Seattle when coming from say
Texas – more rain for Seattle! The other piece
that really caught everyone’s attention was the stock chart in the
Money section – now we could see winners and losers in a clear and
concise manner – really made reading the paper that much more enjoyable
and oh by the way – educational!
Take
a minute and check out the Many-Eyes site – there are some pretty cool
works already posted to the site and this being an election year you
can play with some cool data from the various politico conventions.
Design does matter – this fact is so important in all aspects of life
and business and for that matter so does data, combining the two will
be the next wave in the technology and business convergence –
allowing managers at all levels to impact decisions and bring more
people into the conversation. In the end information shared among a
larger audience is truly the future – let’s start looking at answers to
questions we never knew where out there…
Come
back and let me know what you think, I will continue to share my
thoughts about technology, design, collaboration, current events and oh
yes people!Kevin-