Not that long ago, The Economist ran a story visualizing disruption among tech firms. Many things stood out—not the least of which was the extent to which IBM has fallen from its halcyon days.

In a similar vein, I recently saw this neat interactive data visualization on the subreddit data is beautiful:

Antiquated chart generation and distribution processes make no sense today.

Click here to see it there.

Thoughts

Ask yourself how many static reports one would have to create to replicate the one above. Maybe one looks like this:

Think for a moment about how much time it would require. Imagine then having to e-mail those as standalone graphs in a spreadsheet to your manager whose inbox is already overflowing. In 2019, this antiquated process makes no sense me either.

Put differently, the days of boring, static pie and bar charts are coming to an end. You can credit the new breed of exciting data-visualization tools. The usual suspects include d3, Tableau, PowerBI, Sisense, and others.¹

On a related note, the dataviz above dovetails nicely with a presentation that a group of my CIS235 students gave last week on data visualization—a subject near and dear to my heart. The team discussed the importance of interactivity in contemporary dataviz. I nodded violently in agreement. It’s a point that I make in just about every talk that I give about The Visual Organization.

You may think that creating interactive data visualizations requires a great deal of time and oodles of coding experience.

And you’d be wrong. It didn’t take me long to create and tweak this PowerBI multi-tab data visualization on my courses taught by semester and modality:

Simon Says

At a high level, there are two types of organizations these days:

• Those that are actively using interactive tools.
• Those that are clinging to antiquated ones.

I suspect that the former are bridging the IT-business divide far better than the latter.

Is your organization embracing the present and future or dataviz? Or is it stuck in the past?