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186 Part II • Descriptive Analytics

data warehouse. At a minimum, these warehouses involve a range of dimensions (e.g.,
product, location, organizational structure, time), a range of measures, and millions of
cells of data. In an effort to address these challenges, a number of researchers have
developed a variety of new visualization techniques.

Visual Analytics

Visual analytics is a recently coined term that is often used loosely to mean nothing more
than information visualization. What is meant by visual analytics is the combination
of visualization and predictive analytics. While information visualization is aimed at
answering “what happened” and “what is happening” and is closely associated with
business intelligence (routine reports, scorecards, and dashboards), visual analytics is
aimed at answering “why is it happening,” “what is more likely to happen,” and is usually
associated with business analytics (forecasting, segmentation, correlation analysis).
Many of the information visualization vendors are adding the capabilities to call them-
selves visual analytics solution providers. One of the top, long-time analytics solution
providers, SAS Institute, is approaching it from another direction. They are embedding
their analytics capabilities into a high-performance data visualization environment that
they call visual analytics.
Visual or not visual, automated or manual, online or paper based, business reporting
is not much different than telling a story. Technology Insights 4.2 provides a different,
unorthodox viewpoint to better business reporting.

technOLOgy insights 4.2 telling great stories with Data
and visualization

Everyone who has data to analyze has stories to tell, whether it’s diagnosing the reasons for
manufacturing defects, selling a new idea in a way that captures the imagination of your target
audience, or informing colleagues about a particular customer service improvement program.
And when it’s telling the story behind a big strategic choice so that you and your senior
management team can make a solid decision, providing a fact-based story can be especially
challenging. In all cases, it’s a big job. You want to be interesting and memorable; you know
you need to keep it simple for your busy executives and colleagues. Yet you also know you
have to be factual, detail oriented, and data driven, especially in today’s metric-centric world.
It’s tempting to present just the data and facts, but when colleagues and senior manage-
ment are overwhelmed by data and facts without context, you lose. We have all experienced
presentations with large slide decks, only to find that the audience is so overwhelmed with data
that they don’t know what to think, or they are so completely tuned out, they take away only a
fraction of the key points.
Start engaging your executive team and explaining your strategies and results more
powerfully by approaching your assignment as a story. You will need the “what” of your story
(the facts and data) but you also need the “who?,” the “how?,” the “why?,” and the often missed
“so what?” It’s these story elements that will make your data relevant and tangible for your
audience. Creating a good story can aid you and senior management in focusing on what
is important.
Why story?
Stories bring life to data and facts. They can help you make sense and order out of a disparate
collection of facts. They make it easier to remember key points and can paint a vivid picture of
what the future can look like. Stories also create interactivity—people put themselves into stories
and can relate to the situation.

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