Business Intelligence is a broad topic, spanning a set of technologies and business improvements spanning from enterprise reporting to analytics to performance management. One of the more interesting areas is in data exploration and visualization.
State-of-the art BI tools enable a level of exploration and data visualization beyond our wildest imagination when I started in BI 15 years ago. At that time, to achieve acceptable performance virtually everything deployed to a broad audience had to be pre-designed, and with only a limited amount of “ad-hoc” direction by the end-user. The value was still huge—pulling together multiple data sources into a cohesive reporting environment was a jump to light-speed (many companies are still trying to make that jump today).
One of my favorite data visualization tools is the Decomposition Tree. I love the Decomp Tree because it’s super-intuitive…everyone “gets it” right away.
The Decomp tree is powerful not just because it can “break down numbers”—we’ve been doing that with hyperlinks on reports for years. The real power is that it allows users to select his/her own breakdown path, then easily explore that new path, tweak it, and cross-drill across dimension members.
In the screen print above, we started with Geography and switched to fiscal year, then switched to product. The Decomp tree makes it easy to let the user go in any direction in any order—all very easily. No need for the report designer to anticipate every permutation the user might need!
By delivering this type of visualization to users, everyone wins. The users win—they get the information they need quickly. Information at your fingertips – delivered! For IT, tools like the Decomp Tree let users access information in the format they need it, rather than prompting yet another custom reporting request.