A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words or in This Case a Picture of a Thousand Words

Recently I've been working on a roadmap for decision support and business intelligence tools within our business. While I had little trouble pulling this together for most scenarios and tools, when I came to look at visualisation tools I was a little stumped. Most of what I've done in the past has been GIS centric - mashing up data with various layers from a GIS tool to speed business decision making or expose things that might otherwise be obscured in a sea of data. I had a passing familiarity with some other visualisation tools such a Tableau but went hunting for others. One of the less obvious choices was actually introduced to me in passing during last year's Gartner Symposium. It's called Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) and can be used to create word clouds, visually highlighting the words that appear more frequently in a given body of text. As a test I pointed it at my blog and got the word cloud below back (Click here to go to a bigger version of this on Wordle's site.).

Funky? Cool? Yes! (Well at least in my opinion). But, does this sort of technology have an application in the corporate word? Perhaps? I've been mulling over a few ideas:

• Feeding Wordle long documents that are given to me to read. If I see enough prominent words in the resultant word cloud that interest me I read it. If not I file it!
• As a means of mining semi-structured data. A colleague of mine talks about finding the gold amongst all of the documents we have scattered across local drives, file shares and document management systems. Perhaps this is a way of speeding the process of finding that gold. 
• As a type of dashboard to sit over internal social media feeds (Yammer, etc) or other internal collaboration tools - drill down to the source discussions only if you see key words that matter to you.

Drop me a line if you're already doing something with a tool like this, I'm keen to hear what's working for you.

So How Does This Blogging Thing Work Again?

OK, I’ll admit it. Things have been a little quite on my blog recently. Eighteen months is quite a time between posts. Surprisingly, my lack of writing is not due to a lack of time – although my second child did enter the world not long after my last blog entry. It’s more a reflection of a change in circumstances for me, a move from hands on designing and building business intelligence solutions to a role which involves strategizing, positioning, promoting concepts and attempting to envision future ways of working with information.

It’s amazing how not having specific, tangible and concrete problems to solve, issues to deal with or systems to build seems at first to rob you of anything worthy of sharing with the community. But now I’m hoping that some of the concepts I’m working with and the bigger issues that I’m chipping away at over time will carry interest for at least some of you. I doubt I’m the only person facing these challenges and a little sharing and exchange of opinions might be helpful.

Among other things, in the coming months I expect to be trying to establish and build traction around data governance, shape several data migration activities and find ways of better using metadata in our business. If all goes well I’ll also get the opportunity to kick around some data mining based R&D. I’ll endeavor to share what I can where I think it might be of interest. Hopefully there’ll be a bit of two way communication so please do drop me a line if you’ve tackled the problems I’m writing about or have a view on the concepts I’m discussing. I’m a big believer in leveraging multiple points of view where I can!

The first cab off the rank will be a blog entry that combines the concept of a single source of truth, the band Nirvana and my morning run. Keep an eye out for that post in the next day or so.