The Visual Organization

Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions

Phil Simon

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118794388
• eBook ISBN: 9781118858349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Datenvisualisierung

The era of Big Data as arrived, and most organizations are woefully unprepared. Slowly, many are discovering that stalwarts like Excel spreadsheets, KPIs, standard reports, and even traditional business intelligence tools aren't sufficient. These old standbys can't begin to handle today's increasing streams, volumes, and types of data. Amidst all of the chaos, though, a new type of organization is emerging. In The Visual Organization, award-winning author and technology expert Phil Simon looks at how an increasingly number of organizations are embracing new dataviz tools and, more important, a new mind-set based upon data discovery and exploration. Simon adroitly shows how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other tech heavyweights use powerful data visualization tools to garner fascinating insights into their businesses. But make no mistake: these companies are hardly alone. Organizations of all types, industries, sizes are representing their data in new and amazing ways. As a result, they are asking better questions and making better business decisions. Rife with real-world examples and case studies, The Visual Organization is a full-color tour-de-force.

PART ONE
Book Overview and Background

Part I lays the foundation for the entire book. It covers why dataviz matters more than ever and includes the following chapters:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Ascent of the Visual Organization
• Chapter 2: Transforming Data into Insights: The Tools

Introduction

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

—Henry David Thoreau

Professional writers and speakers like me live interesting lives. I’d hazard to guess that most of us work from home, although some maintain proper offices. And when you work from home, strange things can happen. For one, it can become difficult to separate work from leisure. There’s no boss looking over your shoulder to see if you’ve completed that TPS report. Did you get that memo? If you want to take a nap in the early afternoon as I routinely do, no one’s stopping you. In a way, people like me are always at work, even though we’re not always working. It’s fair to say that the notion of work-life balance can be challenging. Lines usually blur. Maybe they’re even obliterated.

In many ways, working from home could not be more different from working for “the man.” Even today, many rigid corporate environments block employees from visiting certain websites via services like Websense. And forget the obvious sites (read: porn). At many companies, there’s no guarantee that employees can access websites that serve legitimate business purposes, at least without a call to the IT help desk to unblock them. Examples include Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Of course, many employees in industrialized countries sport smartphones these days, minimizing the effectiveness of the Websenses of the world. As a result, many companies have reluctantly embraced the Bring Your Own Device movement. That genie is out of the bottle.

We home-based employees, though, don’t have to worry about these types of restrictions. No one stops us from wasting as much time as we want on the Web, the golf course, or anywhere else for that matter. In an increasingly blurry world, though, what does it really mean to waste time? That’s a bit existential. Let me rephrase: Are my tweets generally work related? Have they changed over time? If so, how?

ADVENTURES IN TWITTER DATA DISCOVERY

Twitter tells me that, since 2010, I have tweeted more than 17,000 times as of this writing, or about ten times per day. I’d wager that more than 70 percent of my tweets were work related. (Yes, I have been paid to tweet. Lamentably, I don’t command Kim Kardashian-type rates for my 140 characters.¹⁰Maybe some day.) Twitter has let me connect with interesting people and organizations, many of whom you’ll meet in this book. In the course of researching this book, I searched Twitter for a random sample of thoughts, typically with the hashtag #dataviz. At least to me, Twitter is an exceptionally valuable business service that I would gladly pay to use. While we’re at it, let’s put Twitter client HootSuite in that same boat.

At the same time, though, I unabashedly use Twitter for reasons that have absolutely no connection to work. If you go to @philsimon and follow me (please do), there’s a good chance that you’ll see a few tweets with #Rush and #BreakingBad, my favorite band and TV show, respectively. What’s more, I’ve tweeted many of these things during times and days when I probably should have been working. I could delude myself, but I won’t. A few of my favorite celebrities and athletes have engaged with me on Twitter, bringing a smile to my face. I’ll say it: Twitter is fun.

But let’s stick with work here. Based on what I’m doing, I suspect that my tweets have evolved over time, but how? It’s presumptuous to assume that the content of my tweets is static. (I like to think that I have a dynamic personality.)

To answer this question, I could have accessed my archived tweets via Twitter.com. The company made user data available for download in December 2012. I could have thrown that data into Microsoft Excel or Access and started manually looking for patterns. Knowing me, I would have created a pivot table in Excel along with a pie chart or a basic bar graph. (Yes, I am a geek and I always have been.) The entire process would have been pretty time consuming even though I’ve been working with these productivity staples for a long time. Let’s say that Twitter existed in 1998. If I wanted to visualize and understand my tweets back then, I would have had to go the Microsoft route.

Of course, it’s not 1998 anymore. Answering these simple questions now requires less thought and data analysis than you might expect. Technology today is far more powerful, open, user-friendly, ubiquitous, and inexpensive compared to the mid-1990s.

Like many companies today, Twitter relies upon a relatively open application programming interface (API).¹¹ At a high level, APIs allow devices, apps, and Web services to easily interact with one another. They also facilitate the near-instant flow of data. Lately, APIs have become all the rage. Myriad people use them every day, whether they know it or not. Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Google, and scores of other companies effectively use APIs for all sorts of reasons. And forget massive tech companies with billion-dollar valuations. Many start-ups are based on “the Twitter fire hose,” including the aforementioned HootSuite. Open APIs encourage development of third-party products and services, a topic I discussed in great detail in The Age of the Platform.

One such service is Vizify, a start-up founded in 2011 and based in Portland, Oregon. The company is a proud graduate of both Seattle TechStars and the Portland Seed Fund. I fittingly “met” company cofounder and CEO Todd Silverstein over Twitter in June 2013 while researching this book. Vizify quickly and easily lets users connect to different social networks like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and LinkedIn.

It took about three minutes for Vizify to pull my photos, education history, current occupation, work history, home page, tweets, and other key profile data that I’ve chosen to make publicly available. Of course, users aren’t obligated to connect to any individual network. (I passed on FourSquare.) After the init...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Series
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Other Books by Phil Simon
• Dedication
• Chronology
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• How to Help This Book
• Part One: Book Overview and Background
• Part Two: Introducing the Visual Organization
• Part Three: Getting Started: Becoming a Visual Organization
• Part Four: Conclusion and the Future of Dataviz
• Afterword: My Life in Data
• Appendix: Supplemental Dataviz Resources
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index