User interfaces for visual analysis and monitoring in business intelligence

Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey, Christoph Treude
2009 Proceedings of the 2009 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research - CASCON '09  
Theme: Smart Interactions Business intelligence is concerned with understanding and leveraging the vast amounts of information stored in the databases of modern enterprises. Visualization techniques have been used to make sense of this data for a long time, first in the form of simple charts, and nowadays in the form of interactive visualizations. By leveraging the strengths of the human perceptual system and incorporating user interaction, they support the flexible analysis of data as well as
more » ... ata monitoring by users. The recent progress in the fields of information and data visualization as well as new hardware developments and trends in business intelligence have led to several new challenges, which will be discussed in this workshop. Visualization Interface Usability and Discoverability Using visualization environments requires training and remains hard for business users. Often, specially trained analysts create reports that are consumed by managers. This disconnects the decision making from data exploration and understanding. With easier-to-use interfaces, a larger audience would be enabled to explore and create visualizations themselves. To achieve this goal, learning barriers in current tools need to be discovered and removed, which might require new user interfaces and interaction techniques. Dashboards are now commonly used and customized by business analysts to support monitoring and awareness of business activities. Dashboards are highly configurable and present information visually through graphics such as charts, maps or tables. Current research on dashboard aims at both dashboard developers and dashboard users: For one, it is challenging to design dashboards that are easy to configure and to extend. In addition, understanding how different groups of individuals use existing dashboards and what kind of information they are looking for is a pre-requisite for the success of any dashboard product.
doi:10.1145/1723028.1723083 dblp:conf/cascon/GrammelST09 fatcat:vrsf7s2tgnaxjhpkygoxdkls3e