Business intelligence analytics.

Data-driven decision making—orienting business decisions around data—drives major IT initiatives across all business sectors. Although buzzwords such as “data-driven decisions” and its “big data” and “data science” cousins might be overused, underneath them lie real opportunities for organizations to understand and reflect on their processes and customers. Collecting the information is only the first step. A great deal of research has investigated the process by which people work with data: how they ask questions about it, make sense of it, and communicate with it. A critical part of this chain is information visualization tools. Visualization provides a powerful way to make sense of data. By mapping data attributes to visual properties such as position, size, shape, and color, visualization designers leverage perceptual skills to help users discern and interpret patterns in data. For a first foray into the information visualization field, see Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think1 and “Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis.”