Rick Ross on Business, Technology and Life: Interface and Graphics

Making Sense of Data Overload

No news here - the internet and social media are providing us with overwhelming amounts of potentially useful information. Beyond simplistic tools, like trending topics and tag clouds, how can we mine valuable business information from the morass?

A picture is worth a thousand words and carefully constructed graphical representations of data are even better. Unfortunately, old standbys like pie charts and bar graphs struggle under the weight of increasing complexity.

Using data collected from Twitter, the author of the first post provides four examples of more sophisticated emerging representations of what are becoming known as "business intelligence graphics".

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter

An Unstoppable Dynamic Duo

In a business context, software is developed to enhance results. The typical thinking is that while employees use software, software has its job and people have theirs.

Instead of a division of labor, developers need to consider another option: human /computer collaboration. The combination works extraordinarily well, and is shockingly underutilized. Yes, you can read this as: major opportunity for competitive advantage.

The following article provides a clear example of this approach. Consider how it can be applied to your business.

Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model?

Too Much Control?

As companies encounter problems, they add controls to prevent recurrence. What could be wrong with that? The short list appears below.

Controls:

may be ineffective and never serve the purpose for which they were intended
may have unintended consequences
become outdated over time
may accumulate to the point where they hamper effectiveness

What can you do to prevent these problems? The author of the final article uses airport security to highlight problems with controls and offers a suggestion to keep them in check.

What Shoe Bombers Tell Us About Office Bureaucracy

In his wonderful book,Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, author Edward R. Tufte argues that, had data correlating launch temperature and O-ring damage been properly presented, the Challenger disaster may have been averted (pgs. 39-53). Instead engineers missed the fateful relationship. This oversight was largely the result of graphical presentation that should have made an obvious pattern stand out, but didn't.

Little drawings of 48 rockets marked with O-ring damage history seemed both clever and appropriate, but added "visual noise". This noise robbed the graphic of it's most critical element - clarity. The sad results of this oversight are history.

In another example from the same book, Tufte discusses the 1854 cholera epidemic in London that caused 616 deaths. According to Tufte, "Dr. John Snow (Queen Victoria's anesthesiologist) was able to discover the cause of the epidemic and bring it to an end". Acting on the effective graphics he'd developed, he devised a simple solution. He removed the handle from a Broad Street water pump, halting the spread of the disease.

But how could quality graphical presentation have have helped with more recent problems? Consider the June 17, 2009 article Use Heat Maps to Expose Rare but Dangerous Frauds by Toby J. F. Bishop & Frank Hydoski in the online edition of Harvard Business Review. The authors argue that simple to comprehend "heat maps" may have exposed events like "the rogue trading in 2007 that cost Société Générale more than $7 billion or the recent Madoff case."