Design is choice.

”What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult–that is, the revelation of complexity.”
Edward R. Tufte

Just as a lot of innovative visualisations are coming from the newly arised social networking theme of the web, we are just beginning to look at visualisations for the enterprise. The visual status of the information an enterprise consists of is not really taken seriously considering the amount of money there is to save if you got your information right. Spending some time and some serious money you can actually see what your enterprise looks like. This is not as obvious nowadays as it might seem when enterprises are becoming more and more virtual.

Since a lot of enterprises are turning more and more virtual (like outsourcing of both physical and knowledge processes like IT or production and sourcing) there is an increased demand for what you can actually see and understand. A factory of traditional means is physical and can be visited and inspected and thereby easily improved from what you see in regards of both machinery and processes. These “factories” are no more a part of the traditional enterprise in the industrialized part of the world, but the urge to actually go into the factory and see what’s going on and improve processes and machinery, is still there.
This is why we need the ability to create and edit business logics and invent ground breaking visualisations. Perhaps even augmented reality in the long run.

Many “social-networking-classics” visualisation techniques with nodes and edges in different colours could and should be used where it has its place, but the difference is that we are not applying these visualisation techniques on the social networking field of information, but on the actual enterprise and the business logic. Some new visualisation techniques will have to be produced as well. A little paraphrasing on WYSIWYG would be WYSIWYCI (What you see is what you can improve).

What we can see and feel, we can understand and improve. This is one of the keys for any enterprise that wants to survive in the future.

By the way, how DO you improve something invisible?

Co-author Ulf Jensen

Visualising the complete enterprise is not done in an afternoon. One of the key parts of being able to do it at all is having a common point of reference. A common point to refer everything back to. If every piece of information in an enterprise is constantly changing, including values and market behaviour, you need to have one place to actually feel solid ground. Ground that doesn’t move. You have to stand somewhere when you are looking out into the vast space of the information that a global enterprise consists of. Preferably you need to be in the middle of everything to be able to see what’s going on around you, since everything is moving and constantly changing. Very much like a living organism. This solid ground is what we name the common point of reference. Every piece of information has its anchor back to this point.

Having this common point of reference makes the visualisation actually achievable. This common point is not a bunch of servers making up the master data, we would still be confused and have enormous difficulties sorting out what’s what if this would be the case. The common point of reference is one of the most critical parts of an enterprise information management capabilites and in the extension of this the enterprises actual ability to improve and evolve in a controlled way. And critical to be able to produce a visualisation of the data fusion showing the enterprises actual and possible state.

I thought I’d show this idea. I wrote this in october last year in Processing 0148 (nice version btw).

The main purpose of ShapeNet is to get myself to look at more than the first 10 hits of a search at Google. If I only evaluate 10 out of 2.5 million hits, or even click ”next ten” two(!) times, I haven’t looked at more results than in this one ”page” and yet bored in the process. Some people may argue that they get what they want in the first page. I still just have to believe that there might lie some hidden goodies behind on of those 2.5 million hits.

The display of the searchresults are focused on the summary since this is the main ”persuader” of how the page is related to my own intentions. The potential for several enhancements (categorisation/animation/colors) is not yet fully explored. And, it puts the ”surfing” back in websurfing.

You find the whole thing, downloadable and all, under the page ShapeNet in the menu above.

To visualise the data from this software makes the visualisation process speed up quite dramatically. It more or less cuts the “classic” visualisation process in half.

Having this fortune I can focus more intense on the representation and interaction than the ordinary visualiser can. It also liberates me from rough questions like how does these bit of data or information connect and relate. It is more or less just a matter of giving it a face. To simply show it. Wonderful.

But this also puts me in a rather new situation where I can start thinking about things that might be considered a bit more profound. Like where and how could we show truly invisible structures, like the enterprises business logic. And we can also go a bit further when it comes to decision-support systems. We will be able to “calculate” consequences and thereby also have the possibility to give recommendations depending on a certain consequence. Rulebased in natrue, but still, when you have a global enterprise of 20 000 people or more, it gets kind of hard to have utter control of the enterprise. Our little software could actually give you that. And with a decent visualisation connected to it, present information on a level that we have never seen before.

As the old saying goes:

“A person with a watch knows the time; a person with two watches is never sure.”

The single view of data is crucial in today’s rapid business, but data quality is essential and it has big problems right now. So many different sources. So many systems. It makes it hard to get decent decision-support even if you use a really good decision support tool.  These decision-support tools don’t really care about the quality of data. They just assume that the source is the correct one. Too bad everyone doesn’t use our software. The world of data would truly become a much simpler one.

Entropy is a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of energy.
See below reflection on this term.

Could this be valuable to the analysis of a enterprises information state?

A measure like Information Entropy could suggest:
- ”the measure of the uniformity of the distribution of information”.
- ”measures the dispersal of information: how much information is spread out in a particular process, or how widely spread out it becomes”.

Strikes me that we could describe Business Logic Entropy as well…

Should get this into experimentation as soon as possible.

Reflection (quoted from chemistry student blog)

In second-semester college chemistry, just this year, I learned about the concept of entropy. Entropy, I was told, measures the tendency of a system to fall into disorder. And that’s probably what my instructor – a caring, competent, and well-educated person — thought correct, no doubt because that was what he himself learned as a college student. Entropy, we learned, is a measure of chaos.

This is a familiar concept, since culturally we speak of messiness (messy desks, messy rooms) as demonstrations of an increase in entropy.

I was completely fascinated by the concept of entropy, and had to learn more. I looked it up on the internet, and was most surprised by what I found. My teacher, along with generations of other scientists and educators, had been misled.

What we had all been taught (we students and my teacher as well) was wrong.  Thermodynamic entropy is not a measure of chaos. It is not a measure of the tendency of systems to fall into disorder and decay. The most current view of entropy states that entropy “measures the dispersal of energy: how much energy is spread out in a particular process, or how widely spread out it becomes.”