dmurray's blog

Last night I viewed a great web video provided by TedBlog and Reddit in which Reddit users submitted questions to Hans Rosling.

I’ve been trolling the web for awhile searching for the best data visualization sites.  These are some of my favorites.  Many of them also contain links to other excellent resource sites.

www.perceptualedge.com

I’ve met a number of people who work in large organizations.  These companies have big sums invested in data warehouse and business information software tools.

Last weekend I spend a few hours analyzing the results for the 2009 Tour De France.  I was pulling for Lance Armstrong (the old guy) to win number 8.

Alas, that wasn’t to be.  I do think it’s amazing that a 36 year old guy who had been out of the sport for almost 4 years managed to finish a very competitive 3^rd.

I’ve attached the Tableau packaged workbook with all of the results.

Typical business information vendors require you to invest a lot of money before you receive any actual benefit from your purchase.

InterWorks takes a different approach.  We believe that an incremental “evolutionary” model for building a business information system is more appropriate for the majority of entities with fewer than 250 employees.

Why?  Building a solution incrementally and using Tableau Software as the front end user interface provides the following benefits:

I was inspired to quit a job and an industry that I had worked in for over 20 years to work in the technology field and promote data visualization.

My experience at the first Tableau User Conference in July of 2008 really motivated me to make this career change.  While having a very interesting and fulfilling job before I realized that there was a common theme every job responsibility or project I had to manage.

I wanted the data first.

In part II of this series, Some Words You Need to Know,  I explained some of the basic terminology required to understand the concepts which will be discussed in later blog posts for this series.

In Part I of this series;  Eliminating Uncertainty, I discussed the need to clearly define what you want to capture in your High Value Low Cost data warehouse.

Uncertainty about numbers is the source of a lot of arguments in business, government and in your personal life. 

The Big BI industry has tried to address this problem by pointing out the obvious benefits that a data warehouse can bring, that being:

The unfortunate truth about traditional heavy business information technologies is that they require the report developer to predict the types of questions that the information consumer is going to ask.

 This fact contributes to frustration for both the people building the reports and the information consumers who need flexible tools.