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By Tom Groenfeldt
The financial services industry lives on impressive quantities of data that expose, or more often obscure, the opportunity to spot pricing disparities that can be extremely profitable to the first who can identify and act on the information.
So it may be a bit surprising to learn that until fairly recently rows and columns of numbers in Excel have been the most common presentation format. That is changing, and not just in financial services but in sales and marketing, supply chain management, executive information and defense.
Frank Freitas, global head of product strategy at international brokerage firm Instinet, says the company's use of Adobe's Flex to provide an interactive rich Internet experience has been catching on recently, perhaps because a generation that grew up on video games is now moving into business.
"When I show our visualization tools to people I am trying to sell to, it is like watching a light bulb go on -- 'I can't believe I am seeing this, never thought I needed it and now can't believe I got along without it,'" says Freitas. "People who were used to working with green screens or Excel can now use this -- I would say that we are looking somewhat at a changing of the guard."
Oculus, a Toronto-based data visualization company, has expanded its expertise in finance to other areas, such as portfolios of coal mines and oil wells for natural resources companies.
Richard Brath, a partner at Oculus, says visual tools provide a useful alternative to lists or colored pins stuck into maps. The visual information could include production, profitability, costs, equipment required, and number and types of staff needed to operate. The company has used bar charts and scatter charts incorporating colors and shapes to provide more than three dimensions of information.
In an Oculus graphical representation of avian flu around the world, virtual pins in the map showed where the flu was, while color codes showed outbreak types -- humans, farmed animals, pet birds, wild birds and migratory bird -- and the height of the pins showed the number of cases. A researcher then added an overlay of migratory patterns for birds.
Brath says legal teams reviewing millions of e-mails for litigation have used visualization tools to achieve a fourfold increase in productivity by improving their queries, workflow and aggregation of results.
"They might grab little fragments that are interesting and then start to group them by common threads, then build a hypothesis -- are these characters talking about trying to commit fraud?" says Brath. An extended search can have 10 to 15 tasks, and visualization helps the teams achieve each task more effectively.
Panopticon, based in Stockholm and operating globally, also has its base in financial services but works with a variety of other companies in areas such as supply chain management and inventory controls. Hugh Heinsohn, vice president of marketing, says visualization often reveals problems in seconds that might otherwise require hours of searching through spreadsheets.
A treemap can show product shortages, and the size of the square will show how big a customer is involved; a snacks company will be more concerned about a shortfall at Wal-Mart -- represented by a big square on a treemap -- than at a single neighborhood convenience store which shows up as a tiny square. A furniture manufacturing company says it took two days to figure out what was going on in their orders and shipments with spreadsheet data; using Panopticon the same tasks take about half an hour.
Another tool combines information from a company's Web site with CRM information to help determine if a prospect is seriously considering a purchase. Visualization is especially important in fast-moving businesses, such as soft drinks on a hot summer day, because they can show potential problems and offer the option to drill-down to more data in time to send out supplemental deliveries.
"Visualization offers the ability to find things that are difficult or impossible to see with traditional measures, and do it fast," says Heinsohn. "People can interpret pictures very quickly, because the brain is oriented to that. The human brain is not well geared to look at columns and rows of numbers in a report." He uses the tool himself to analyze Google ad words and determine which words convert to action and where the company is paying too much for a word.
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