Articles > Interview - MenteGraphica
For the original interview see the infovis blog mentegrafica.
1 - When, how and why have you decided to start up a company focusing
on Infovis?
We have a broad experience in Excel reporting and BI for many years and have
been often surprised how people optimize the reporting with those technologies,
but still use old in-effective techniques to visualize data.
This was the motivation to found BonaVista, which means in Latin: good view.
To do better in that area is our mission.
Stephen Few, Tufte and others lay the theoretical ground for good data visualization, which delivers additional value to the user. Unfortunately most of the big BI focuses on show effects, not the numbers. Just look at BusinessObjects they call Xcelsius a data visualization strategy. It is more an interactive videogame for C-level managers than a visualization strategy.
2 - What are your education backgrounds and previous experiences
before creating BonaVista Systems?
I studied computer science and mathematics. Then I worked 10 years as
implementation consultant for ERP and BI systems and later I focused on data
visualization. I had to do a lot with Excel.
3 - Which is the best results your customers got using your infovis
Services and/or products?
We help them to better understand their business.
4 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on
and why?
This is our product MicroCharts. It enables our users to understand complex
relationships in Excel sheets with sparklines. Sparklines are tiny charts with
an intensity of visual distinctions comparable to words and letters invented by
information design guru Edward Tufte. Placed in an Excel cell, this format
allows fast effective parallel comparisons. This certainly is one aspect of
producing documents that communicates effectively.
We brought the concept of sparklines to the Microsoft BI stack too. We offer
alternative and additional visualization methods to the ineffective trend arrows
in Excel 2007 with our sparklines and more ideas to come. This way you avoid the
recency bias, the tendency to focus on “what’s happened lately” when evaluating
or judging something. A trend arrow shows you only a figure compared to a
previous period. But a sales increase of 10% compared to last week is
problematic when you had constantly decreasing sales the last 10 weeks.
Sparklines really shows you these problematic patterns.
This supports also Ben Schneidermann’s Visual Information Seeking mantra:
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand. Sparkline sheets show
the shape of thousands of figures in an Excel sheet.
Rolf Hichert, the German guru in visualization and somehow the central European
counterpart of Edward Tufte, put it that way “Executives want their data
condensed, their information all on one page.”
5 - On what themes are you working now ?
Still MicroCharts. We still have a lot of work to do to make a great
product.
6 - How do you think infovis solutions market will evolve in your
country for next years ?
First of all, I don’t believe in big regional differences in the evolution
of data visualization. The problem is global, and so is the visualization
community working on better solutions.
I believe that the infovis market will grow rapidly in the next years. The data
is there, we can store large amounts of it, data processing is fast enough,
internet transports the data in fractions of a second over 20.000 kilometers.
But the bottleneck still is the last 30 inches: The way from the computer
monitor to the brain of the end user.
Imaging the top manager in front of his brand new 20″ computer screen, brand new
hardware, billions of figures were collected worldwide, filtered and cleaned,
enriched and aggregated in seconds using the fastest servers available, and then
all he sees on his screen are 3 photo-realistic speedometers communicating 3
figures, decorated with logos and color gradients. Computer monitor are still
too small and the resolution is still to low compared with paper. We can not
waste a pixel with useless decoration.
SAP started to sell the vision of a “war room” for the management, a room with
literally hundreds of computer monitors installed at the walls, each of them
showing KPIs with speedometers or table reports. We believe in a different
approach.
It’s the last 30 inches we have to bridge, and with the help of info design
prophets, Edward Tufte, Stephen Few, Rolf Hichert, to name some, more and more
managers will have awareness of good info design, and will ask for software that
supports their demands. So I am quite optimistic that the infovis market,
especially the BI data visualization market, will grow significantly in the next
years.
7 - If you should suggest an education program to a student
interested in infovis, which University Course do you suggest him/her?
Unfortunately, Germany’s universities do not offer any education program
that focuses on infovis yet. If you want to learn how to produce good infovis
software, it is useful to have some knowledge of software engineering and good
knowledge in data analysis, usability and infovis.