Thinking about BI: Infographics is the next phase…

I have been thinking about BI… prompted by a friend, Frank Bien, who is the CTO of Looker (you are welcome, Frank, for the plug…) but this post is about a  trend in BI that is worth exploring… and only maybe about Looker or any other tool.

BI was originally about reporting… in its very first iterations users coded SQL directly, or used a 4GL scripting language, and the BI tool was there for formatting the output. Then more focus was put on query-building to make it easier for developers to effectively get the required data.

There was lots of talk at this point about knowledge-workers and do-it-yourself BI… but it never really worked out that way. Business users requested canned reports and went to a query guru to request special reports as required.

The following was pretty normal: after finding some interesting fact in a tabular report a business user would pull the data and build a Powerpoint slide to present the results. As interfaces improved you soon could access the data directly and create Excel or Powerpoint charts without copying the data by hand. In other words data visualization was separated from reporting.

The BI vendors caught on to this, recognizing that data presentation is important, and soon all of the BI tools offered some charting options. But the next step was equally interesting. Charting is a bit of an art… so the BI tools programmed in some directives to help you select the chart that fit your data and that would be visually pleasing. So simple charting as visualization was built-in with some simple assistance to help you with the simple art of presentation.

From here vendors went in two directions, one after the other.

First, dashboards were developed that were customizable and these applications, either semi-static or dynamic, caught your eye. Red lights and limits could be built into a heads-up display. The art of presentation was pretty crude and loudness: bright colors and lots of moving dials and eye-candy won the day. But as far as presentation goes, dashboards are just multiple simple charts arranged on a screen. QlikView led this charge.

Next, a new set of visualization products were rolled out by vendors like Tableau and Pentaho. Users saw that some very powerful pictures could be drawn showing data in a time series… and showing the series changing over time. Since the presentation was more nuanced and more “artistic” the automated assistance required more sophistication and this is where the vendors are now fighting to differentiate themselves.

But an interesting thing was happening outside BI… and this is the point of this note. In the same way that PowerPoint led reporting to charting, a new presentation technique called infographics is emerging. It is the state of the art in data visualization… and Powerpoint… and art… rolled into one. And it is very impactful. I imagine that the next wave of BI tools must embrace this more advanced presentation technique.

Here is how I think this plays out.

The advanced data visualization vendors will provide a palette that directly accesses data, and big data, to allow very custom infographics… you can see some of this at Piktochart although it is more about templates than free form development. But since this is art… tools will be developed that help the art-impaired like me to build nice displays and they will do this by analyzing the data and recommending one or more meaningful infographic displays.

So, maybe in the same way that Powerpoint data presentation anticipated charting in BI tools… Infographics anticipates the next data presentation facility for BI.

I suppose that this is not really a controversial conclusion… and I imagine that if I took the time I could find several start-ups who are way ahead of me on this… but sometimes it’s more fun to daydream it up on my own… and pretend that I’m out front…