When the alarm sounds, do you grab your mobile device to check the headlines? Check status updates on your tablet? Flip on the TV to catch the news? Check into Foursquare? Do you need a checklist for what to tackle first? If any of this rings true, you are not alone. Our clients are completely overwhelmed and drowning in data. Information is coming at them from every available source on a real time basis. What should they tackle first?
As Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology stated in his article, The Real Point of Visualizations: Managing Data Overload Without Algorithms, "It's not necessarily the amount of information that's daunting for us, but rather the form of it…. Mostly that's because the posts are made up of words, which require another level of symbolic interpretation before we know if we are interested in them." We believe the answer lies within data visualization. Seeing IS believing! Check out this cool word graph that highlighted how Americans were feeling about the economy in 2011, as reported by Kevin Drum on Mother Jones, Chart of the Day: Our Weak, Uncertain, Fragile Economy
We are now halfway through 2012. Do you have a clear picture of where your company is headed? Where it has been? How you are going to tackle each morning? Trends in Business Intelligence point every business owner towards mobile applications and data visualizations. Our owners are in constant motion and bombarded with data at every corner. Conrad Bates and Cameron Wall reported in the recent article, Top Six BI Trends for 2012, "Analytics will help companies differentiate themselves, it will allow them to run more efficiently, make the most of their customers and increase profitability. Analytics provides organisations with actionable intelligence. While BI has traditionally been hard to create a business case for, analytics has a direct correlation to an organisation's top or bottom line." Analytics is key in this business intelligence era. Data should be discovered whenever the opportunity presents itself in the hands of the user. As reported by Forrester Research Inc., Q2: 2012 Forrester Wave: Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms, "80% of all BI requirements should be carried out by the business users themselves". We don't want to become yet another "task" to check off that morning to-do list. We want to provide the user with actionable intelligence!
CFO Rapid Fire is the life preserver you need now that you are drowning in data.
