There are now loads of ways to create charts and graphs and publish them for consumption by others. But a big problem though is the skill set that is required to use these tools and technologies. You need a very specialized combination of business/domain knowledge, data and technical skills and graphical design abilities. If you don’t get all these bases covered, you don’t just get bad reports, you can produce dangerously misleading information [read about bad visualization by Stephen Few http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=266 and Howard Spielman http://www.information-management.com/bissues/20061201/2600277-1.html]. As the CIO of a large consumer products company told me, “we don’t have those skill sets and I don’t want to have to build teams with those skills.”
This is a big gap and an important factor that has been overlooked in vendors’ eagerness to get eye candy into their products. Who is going to use these tools and how do they dovetail into the workflow– current and future? So, some of the issues/gaps that need to be addressed in getting better information to decision makers:
1. Skills sets: As mentioned, those needed to create accurate and meaningful charts and dashboards are hard to hire for, so tools need to get “smarter”. That way, users don’t have to get skilled up on esoteric competencies and management isn’t confused.
2. Workflow: Exploration needs to come before the output of explanation—this is the problem with tools that just create diagrams and slides and status views on a portal page: it creates an inefficient process when the analysis has to be done using a completely different set of tools (and often by a different set of people) and then ported into reports. Analysis comes first, then publishing of the analysis. It just makes sense then that analysis and reporting need come from a single tool to efficiently fit into the day-to-day workflow.
3. Analyst bottleneck: In the future organization, doesn’t everyone want more speed and efficiency? That won’t happen if we’re still bottlenecked getting every question answered through an analyst or report writer and then forcing those answers up through MS Office documents. As that same CIO also said, “I’ve got 500 people here and 350 of them are writing SQL queries responding to ad-hoc report requests. It’s slow and inefficient, and we can’t continue to scale like this.” The business side needs to be able to iteratively ask and get answers and satisfy themselves.
