Visual Communication

CIOs, Few says, have a key role to play in making sure data presentations are more effective. For one thing, the CIO is in an excellent position to put pressure on software vendors to offer better support of visual communication, something very few vendors currently even have on their agenda.

Most vendors are so buried in their effort to provide more features and functions than their competitors that they never step back to ask what users really need from their software, Few believes. "That's common, and until enough people are putting pressure on them to do a better job, they will continue to do what they're doing, because they are still selling their software and nobody is complaining about it," he says.

However, he also says anyone in the organization who is aware of the problem needs to be exposing it as widely as possible, and who better than the CIO to take on that role?

"I think a CIO is in a great position to point out the fact that to be able to use the software more effectively to communicate data, there is a certain skill set that you have to learn. He or she should use examples to show how it can be done better and should especially point out the fact that by not doing it better the company is losing a lot of money, wasting a lot of time and sometimes making bad decisions because the data is not being presented accurately," he says.

Common Failings

To make meaningful judgements about data presentation practices that do not work means starting with clear principles about the purpose of data presentation and what identifies it when it does work. It really all boils down to one thing - communication - Few says. Any presentation of data, whether in the form of tables or graphs or in some combination like a dashboard, is only successful to the degree that it communicates to a target audience what it is meant to communicate.

As Edward Tufte so simply yet eloquently put it: "Above all else show the data." Having established communication as the desired outcome, any data presentation practice that does not communicate effectively is a problem.

Nevertheless, most people start off entirely ignorant of the message to be communicated. It is no good just knowing you have a story to tell about sales - you have to know what it is the data reveals about sales. Have sales as a measure of revenue steadily declined over the past three months? Have you found that, even though sales have steadily increased year to date, you are well below your plan for the year? Have you noticed that the only reason that sales are on target for the year is because one particular salesperson in Asia is burning up the market?

"Before you decide how to present the data, step back for a moment and think carefully about what you want to say. Actually put it into one or more sentences that are as complete and meaningful as necessary to communicate what your audience needs to understand," Few advises. "Those words will give you clues that will direct you to present data in a particular way."

Take the following message: Even though we're 5 percent ahead of our year-to-date revenue plan, four of our five products have been steadily declining in sales since the beginning of the year. That we are ahead of plan is entirely due to the success of a single product; yet 80 percent of the sales force is dedicated to the four products that are declining. This is important information that should generate action, Few says, but that message would be lost in a graph that displayed overall year-to-date revenue compared to plan. The fact that the message concerns: 1. changing sales through time, 2. a contrast between the four declining products and the one increasing product, and 3. a dominant allocation of sales resources to products that are failing, are all important points that determine how the data ought to be presented.

If you can communicate your message clearly, efficiently and with the desired impact in a simple sentence, do so. If your message requires the precision of a table of numbers and text labels to identify what they are, use them, but do not make your audience use visual perception to interpret that graph, struggling to figure out the exact values of the data encoded as bars or lines when the message has nothing to do with the shape of the data. Sure, some people are more impressed with graphs even when they are a poor means of communication, but that does not justify producing bad and just plain stupid work.

Try to avoid the mistakes common to those wishing to communicate graphically, Few says. First of these is the mistaken belief, promoted through the types of charts vendors tend to include in their software, that in order to communicate data properly using a graph you have to use three dimensions. "What you end up with are these ludicrous presentations of data with these three-dimensional bars and lines going on various axes and so forth," he says.

"The three dimensionality is something that is particularly a problem today and the problem is that the vendors especially 'feature dazzle'. It's kind of like the old problem of people selling sex, well business intelligence software vendors sell sex, basically in the form of absurd dazzle and superfluous design elements in their graphs that actually get in the way of communication."

Avoid the unnecessary heavy grid lines typical of default format graphs and the glitzy radar charts and bubble charts, many of which are almost never useful, at least for standard business practice.