Mediaboss Marketing

Access to information today is supposed to be for everyone. So-called data democracy labels have been ascribed to every vendors presentation layer in an effort to bring more users into contact with actionable business stats of all kinds. This is where data vizualisation comes in as a route to representing abstract data sets as (usually) multi-colored images and graphical representationsdesigned to help humans find and then interpret patterns and trends held inside the business or scientific data in question.

The first law of information democracy states:

As the number of workflow-engaged stakeholders interacting with data vizualisation tools increases (within agreed policy access limitations), the natural propensity increases for actionable insights to be a) taken away and acted upon and b) further fed back into the analytics engine itself.

On paper (or, on screen, obviously) this technology proposition appears to hold water. Giving a wider number of workers access to data vizualisation streams is indeed democratic, but is a little data vizualisation knowledge a dangerous thing?

CEO of data-driven Business Intelligence (BI) tools vendor Looker Frank Bien thinks it might be his firm produces a piece of software for data scientists that is intended to help make tangible sense of the data crucial for growing enterprises through a browser. He says that wider data literacynot visualizationshould be our next enterprise information imperative.

A little data vizualisation is a dangerous thing

Lookers Bien suggests that the new data visualization tools have created a false expectation in the data marketplace. They provide a great way to engage employees with data in a visceral way, but once business users have it, the depth they can explore the data is limited. What this ultimately means is that these users slow down the query process and they make it a challenge to answer complex questions.

The promise of self-service BI and moving data exploration out of IT and into the hands of business users is only partly addressed but this has done more to whet the appetite than to address the real need. Furthermore, the proliferation of visualization tools impedes an organizations ability to make decisions based on reliable metrics, because it leads to a lag in relevance of the data. We are on the cusp of a renaissance in BI in which modern data tools unlock the true business value of data and enable all knowledge workers to explore and engage directly with the data, stated Bien.

Data visualizationwithout education is myopia

The solution he says is to increase data literacy, not improve data visualization. Data literacy is an increasingly strategic focus for organizations of all sizes and a vital driver of business success.

More here:
Debunking The First Law Of Data Democracy