Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

I really hope this blog doesn’t become just a continuous series of rants around my pet peeves regarding data visualization. But…I stumbled across the following in a white paper about measuring visitor engagement on a web site.

This chart was generated from Unica’s Affinium NetInsight product. Unica is a great product, from everything I’ve heard. And, [...]

Pie charts are generally bad enough. Mainly, because they take a lot of real estate to provide pretty limited information. But, they do have their place. That place is showing the relative relationship of the parts of a whole when there is no time dimension.
3D pie charts, though, are simply horrid! They actually misrepresent the [...]

This is my second week in a row in training — just today and tomorrow this week, thankfully. This week, the product is HardMetrics which, frankly, is a pretty damn cool tool. The trainer is the VP of Product Development, who has been architecting and developing in the reporting and analysis space for seven years [...]

I spent all week in partner training for Eloqua, which is one of the premier marketing automation companies. My company has used them for ourselves as well as for our clients for several years with great results. We’ve recently deepened our partnership so that we can actually set up and manage instances of the system [...]

(YET AGAIN aiming for a briefer entry)
We got into a discussion today at work about how we were going to optimize certain aspects of our marketing efforts. Specifically, we were discussing shifting some aspects of some of our campaigns to make the leads from them more segmented in a way that could trigger different sales [...]

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the real world of data is a lot messier than a whole range of information outlets imply. Whether it’s web data, CRM data, or ERP data, it is very, very seldom that there is something going on that, once discovered, can have an immediate and dramatic [...]

In my mind, all too often, we erroneously equate “reporting” with “analysis.” This can lead to a lot of cycles of spinning confusedly through reams of data or, worse, the belief that we “took action from the data” just because we converted a spreadsheet into a chart.
A former colleague of mine, Shane Stephens, and I [...]

I started a home/personal blog a couple of months ago. It’s really geared towards keeping friends and relatives… Okay, let’s be honest — it’s geared towards keeping grandparents updates as to what’s going on in our lives. I also see it as an archival technique that we (or our kids) might get a kick out [...]