Friday, June 12th, 2009

Report Performance Measurement

I’m jealous of people who work in technical professions. They have specific criteria to measure the quality of their output. As a business professional, I want to do exactly that. That’s why I decided to stop waiting and define a few logical quality standards for reporting.

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Palace evolution

Controlling guerillas aren’t being turned away at palace gates anymore. Discover why that is as well as other lessons learned at our Executive Forum last Monday in Berlin.

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Criss-crossing circles

There is an exception to every rule. Even circles, which we usually blame, are sometimes worthy of acclaim – especially in combination with graphical tables.

Friday, May 1st, 2009

The ‘moving’ means to an end

Hans Rosling wanted to show the best statistics ever seen at a TED conference. In my opinion, it was only one of the best presentations of statistics. Here are the pros and cons for using animation in data analysis.

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Vis‑à-vis is not yet visualization

Analyzing means comparing. That is the central rule here. Placing objects next to each other, however, rarely suffices as a comparison. In order to see what there is to see, you usually you have to do some subtracting first.

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Bean counter … and proud of it

Controllers are bean counters – and that is a good thing! After all, good entrepreneurs are as well. And too many captains on one ship spoil the course.

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Gold mine or mine disaster?

The expectations for data mining were very high. Its new methods were supposed to automatically uncover the buried information treasures in databases. Now, the German magazine ‘Wirtschaftsinformatik’ has reprinted an article on this subject in its 50th anniversary commemorative issue. What better reason to look back at 16 years of data mining!

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Your circles disturb me

Since the death of Archimedes, everyone knows that drawing circles brings nothing but trouble. JP Morgan shows us why … as if it didn’t have enough problems already.

Friday, February 20th, 2009

May you chop axes? No…you must!

Today we’ll discuss another important rule in designing graphics. You CAN chop line charts because they should visualize the largest possible differences.

Friday, February 6th, 2009

German Newspaper FAZ uses sparklines (well, almost…)

This blog makes regular pleas for maximum information density. And newspapers offer many great examples. Now, FAZ is further improving its density – to cut costs – and is starting to use graphical tables. Which offers more analytical insight on stock quotes to us readers.