This is the first of 10 articles I will be publishing on Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2011 series. Titled “Visualisation”, this article focuses on organisations increasing the use of information and analytics.
Visualisation – Tech Trends 2011
Enterprises move into 2011 with information at the forefront of their agendas. According to a recent Gartner survey, increasing the use of information and analytics is one of the top three business priorities. Data volumes continue to explode, as unstructured content proliferates via collaboration, productivity and social channels. And while organizations are making headway on enterprise information management and broad analytics solutions, much potential insight is buried within static reports that are accessible only by a small fraction of the organization.
This static, tabular approach runs counter to fundamental patterns of human thinking; our brains have been tuned to recognize shapes, detect movement and use touch to explore surroundings and make connections. Thus, the true value of business intelligence is often lost as companies struggle to communicate complicated concepts and empower more stakeholders.
Visualization refers to the innovative use of images and interactive technology to explore large, high-density datasets. Through multi-touch interfaces, mobile device views and social network communities, organizations are enabling users to see, explore and share relationships and insights in new ways. Spatial and temporal context add physical location and sequencing to the analysis over time, allowing patterns to be uncovered based on the source, flow and evolution of information. Intuitive touch or gesture-based drill-downs and on-the-fly relationship mapping add immediacy to the analysis, encouraging manipulation and higher-order understanding instead of static or passive views.
Though a long-established discipline, visualization deserves a fresh look in 2011, partly due to the evolution of the underlying tools. In-memory databases and distributed MapReduce processing now allow trillions of records and petabytes of data to be sorted, joined and queried. Visualization suites complement business intelligence and analytics platforms, offering rich graphics, 3-D perspectives, interactivity and usability on par with leading consumer experiences – often with deployment channels on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
Another difference in 2011 is the rich potential represented by unstructured data, whereby organizations can tap into millions of internal emails, instant messages and documents, as well as trillions of Facebook objects (100 billion page views per day), Twitter tweets (90 million per day4), text messages, blogs and other content of potential concern to the enterprise. In the face of so many loose connections and non-intuitive correlations, visualization is proving to be an excellent mechanism to make sense of unstructured data and feed it into decision making and process improvement activities.
Download the full article . . . . Visualisation – Tech Trends 2011
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Filed under: Information Technology, analytics, business intelligence, business priorities, Deloitte, enterprise information management, information, information management, technology trends, unstructured content
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