mentegrafica | infovis solutions

« Real Estate, Maps and Ajax | Main | Infovis Tools Review [ ITR ] »

September 23, 2006

An interview with...Andreas Flockermann

Today we are listening to Andrea from BonaVista Systems, that integrated the fantastic sparklines into Excel.

1 - When, how and why have you decided to start up a company focusing on Infovis?
We have a broad experience in Excel reporting and BI for many years and have been often surprised how people optimize the reporting with those technologies, but still use old in-effective techniques to visualize data.
This was the motivation to found BonaVista, which means in Latin: good view.
To do better in that area is our mission.

Stephen Few, Tufte and others lay the theoretical ground for good data visualization, which delivers additional value to the user. Unfortunately most of the big BI focuses on show effects, not the numbers. Just look at BusinessObjects they call Xcelsius a data visualization strategy. It is more an interactive videogame for C-level managers than a visualization strategy.

2 - What are your education backgrounds and previous experiences before creating BonaVista Systems?
I studied computer science and mathematics. Then I worked 10 years as implementation consultant for ERP and BI systems and later I focused on data visualization. I had to do a lot with Excel.

3 - Which is the best results your customers got using your infovis Services and/or products?
We help them to better understand their business.

4 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why?
This is our product MicroCharts. It enables our users to understand complex relationships in Excel sheets with sparklines. Sparklines are tiny charts with an intensity of visual distinctions comparable to words and letters invented by information design guru Edward Tufte. Placed in an Excel cell, this format allows fast effective parallel comparisons. This certainly is one aspect of producing documents that communicates effectively.
We brought the concept of sparklines to the Microsoft BI stack too. We offer alternative and additional visualization methods to the ineffective trend arrows in Excel 2007 with our sparklines and more ideas to come. This way you avoid the recency bias, the tendency to focus on "whats happened lately when evaluating or judging something. A trend arrow shows you only a figure compared to a previous period. But a sales increase of 10% compared to last week is problematic when you had constantly decreasing sales the last 10 weeks. Sparklines really shows you these problematic patterns.
This supports also Ben Schneidermanns Visual Information Seeking mantra: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand. Sparkline sheets show the shape of thousands of figures in an Excel sheet.
Rolf Hichert, the German guru in visualization and somehow the central European counterpart of Edward Tufte, put it that way "Executives want their data condensed, their information all on one page.

5 - On what themes are you working now ?
Still MicroCharts. We still have a lot of work to do to make a great product.

6 - How do you think infovis solutions market will evolve in your country for next years ?
First of all, I dont believe in big regional differences in the evolution of data visualization. The problem is global, and so is the visualization community working on better solutions.
I believe that the infovis market will grow rapidly in the next years. The data is there, we can store large amounts of it, data processing is fast enough, internet transports the data in fractions of a second over 20.000 kilometers. But the bottleneck still is the last 30 inches: The way from the computer monitor to the brain of the end user.
Imaging the top manager in front of his brand new 20