Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

Stephen Few wrote a brilliant (and rather scathing) post recently: Big BI is Stuck: Illustrated by SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. In the post, he extensively quotes marketingspeak from various SAP executives and then picks apart their claims. He follows that part of the post with excerpts from a review of their new BusinessObjects Explorer that highlights [...]

Ryan Goodman of Centigon Solutions wrote up his take on a recent discussion on LinkedIn that centered on the tension between data visualization that is “flashy” versus data visualization that rigorously adheres to the teachings of Tufte and Few.
The third point in Goodman’s take is worth quoting almost in its entirety, as it is both spot-on [...]

I caught an NPR story about recovery.gov last week, and it sounded really promising. Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, the various rounds of stimulus and bailout funding that have come through over the past six months fall somewhere between “throwing money away,” “ready, fire, aim,” and “point in what seems what [...]

I got an e-mail last week just a few hours into Round 1 of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The subject of the email was simply “dumb graph,” and the key line in the note was:
The “game flow” graph…how in the WORLD is that telling me anything? That the score goes up as the [...]

I attended a United Way meeting last week that was hosted at an overburdened county government agency site in south Columbus. The gist of the meeting was discussing the bleakness of the economy and what that could or should mean to the work of the committee. The head of the government agency did a brief [...]

How’s that for a book title? Would it pique your interest? Would you download it and read it? Do you have friends or co-workers who would be interested in it?
Why am I asking?
Because it doesn’t exist. Yet. Call it a working title for a project I’ve been kicking around in my head for a couple of years. In [...]

Data visualization has really been on my mind of late. Partly because I’ve personally been struggling to produce some effectively-presented information, and, even more so, because one of my co-workers has been spending even more time overhauling the way we communicate data-driven information to our clients. He’s making a lot more headway on his work [...]

I’ve glanced through various folks’ copies of Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data on several occasions over the past few years. And, it was a heavy influence on the work that an ad hoc team in the BI department at National Instruments undertook a couple of years ago to standardize/professionalize [...]