Business Analytics is all about - analyzing data, discovering insights and influencing change. Provide answers to Ws: What Happened, When it Happened, Where is happened, Why it Happened? help decisions and drive change. Analytics has been with us for centuries and played a critical role all along. In today's big & complex industrial world, analytics has continued to play a critical role but sadly the current state of the business analytics approach is broken. For the last 25 years, the software technology and tools in the analytics category has produced "slice and dice ninjas" who interact with data but mostly without the right context. This approach produces insights and visualization that can not be understood very well. These solutions are complex, cost-prohibitive, slow and most often fail to deliver to the promises . Visual Analytics came to forefront to address the challenge of traditional business analytics. Visual Analytics is defined as "analytical reasoning aided by visual interfaces". The primary premise for this approach is that "visualization is not an afterthought". This industry has risen very fast in the past few years. In this presentation, I discuss the issues faced by this nascent offshoot of Business Analytics and what does future hold for this category.

1. Past, Present and Future of
Visual Analytics
Jitender Aswani

2. decisionsanswers change
influence

3. March on Moscow by Charles Minard

4. London Cholera Map

5. War Mortality by Florence Nightingale

6. big, critical & increasingly complex

7. broken

8. data approach

9. PCN
Enterprise
>1B
Upper
Mid-­‐Market
>500M
SME
Direct Indirect
Direct:
78M 4%
LE:
1.9M
3%
SME:
6.1M
1%
Total License Revenue: 97.3M
10%
Indirect:
17.3M 2%
VAR : 4.9M 1%
OEM: 9.2M 1%
GA : 3.2M 7%
LE:
SME
86:14
69:31
40:60
LE:
SME
87:13
Direct:
Indirect
38:68
?

10. visualization approach

11. ?

12. ~5-10%
business users
~85-90%
IT
~5%
data analyst
consumersproducers

13. reports and dashboards: not enough

14. immediacyspeed simplicity

15. self-reliance

16. rise of visual analytics
Image courtesy of stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/Burning-Man-Page

17. “analytical reasoning facilitated by
visual interfaces”

18. Source: Tableau: Tale of 100 Entrepreneurs
visualization is not an afterthought

19. “We are at the forefront of an evolutionary market that is
fraught with opportunity for innovative tools and solutions
that can help users handle the information overload plaguing
every major organization around the globe.”
Source: : IDC Market Analysis, Worldwide Interactive Data Visualization Tools Forecast, Emphasis added

20. … the fastest growing segment with 38% and 33%
growth rates in ’11 and ’12…
Source: Emerging Technology Analysis: Visualization-Based Data Discovery Tools, Gartner, June 17, 2011.

21. speed immediacy
simplicity cost
joy

22. Source: Lavastorm Analytics
falling short

23. acknowledgement
Source: Tableau

24. ü access to data
ü know data models
ü merge data
ü understand measures
and dimensions
ü get the right context

25. future

26. ü public + private + social data
ü more semantic enrichment
ü more viz types
ü mobile and cloud authoring
ü predictive
ü more collaboration

27. weather
SF giants
movies
near me
walmart
lincoln
search based visualization

28. get answers to all your business questions
business questions big data
discover more no training

29. in-memory
machine learning
graph structures
NLP
technology
Image courtesy of confederate.com

30. future is incredible!
Image courtesy of stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/Burning-Man-Page