Page 176 -

Chapter 4 • Business Reporting, Visual Analytics, and Business Performance Management 175

And that is only the start of the savings that needed it, and asking for many new types of reports.
WebFOCUS has provided. The number of times that Fortunately, Miles and WebFOCUS were up to the
NFIP staff asks CSC for special reports has dropped task. In some cases, Barton says, “FEMA would ask for
in half, because NFIP staff can generate many of the a new type of report one day, and Miles would have it
special reports they need without calling on a pro- on BureauNet the next day, thanks to the speed with
grammer to develop them. Then there is the cost which he could create new reports in WebFOCUS.”
of creating BureauNet in the first place. Barton esti- The sudden demand on the system had little
mates that using conventional Web and database impact on its performance, notes Barton. “It handled
software to export data from FEMA’s mainframe, the demand just fine,” he says. “We had no prob-
store it in a new database, and link that to a Web lems with it at all.” “And it made a huge difference
server would have cost about 100 times as much— to FEMA and the job they had to do. They had never
more than $500,000—and taken about two years had that level of access before, never had been able
to complete, compared with the few months Miles to just click on their desktop and generate such
spent on the WebFOCUS solution. detailed and specific reports.”
When Tropical Storm Allison, a huge slug of
sodden, swirling clouds, moved out of the Gulf of Questions for Discussion
Mexico onto the Texas and Louisiana coastline in June 1. What is FEMA and what does it do?
2001, it killed 34 people, most from drowning; dam- 2. What are the main challenges that FEMA faces?
aged or destroyed 16,000 homes and businesses; and
displaced more than 10,000 families. President George 3. How did FEMA improve its inefficient reporting
W. Bush declared 28 Texas counties disaster areas, practices?
and FEMA moved in to help. This was the first serious
test for BureauNet, and it delivered. This first compre- Sources: Information Builders, Customer Success Story, “Useful
at
Flows
Information
Disaster
Agency,”
Response
hensive use of BureauNet resulted in FEMA field staff informationbuilders.com/applications/fema (accessed January
readily accessing what they needed and when they 2013); and fema.gov.
sectiOn 4.2 revieW QuestiOns

1. What is a report? What are they used for?
2. What is a business report? What are the main characteristics of a good business
report?
3. Describe the cyclic process of management and comment on the role of business
reports.
4. List and describe the three major categories of business reports.
5. What are the main components of a business reporting system?

4.3 DAtA AnD infoRMAtion VisuAlizAtion

Data visualization (or more appropriately, information visualization) has been defined
as, “the use of visual representations to explore, make sense of, and communicate data”
(Few, 2008). Although the name that is commonly used is data visualization, usually
what is meant by this is information visualization. Since information is the aggrega-
tion, summarizations, and contextualization of data (raw facts), what is portrayed in
visualizations is the information and not the data. However, since the two terms data
visualization and information visualization are used interchangeably and synonymously,
in this chapter we will follow suit.
Data visualization is closely related to the fields of information graphics, information
visualization, scientific visualization, and statistical graphics. Until recently, the major

M04_SHAR9209_10_PIE_C04.indd 175 1/25/14 7:34 AM