City of Charlotte Wows Us with Innovative "Business Analysis Olympiad"

I just returned from one of the most interesting and innovative business events I've ever attended. The City of Charlotte sponsored a "Business Analysis Olympiad" to promote the business value of visual analysis as well as to create a community of visual analysts within the city’s key businesses. When employees use data and information more effectively, they make better business decisions and thus serve the citizens of Charlotte better.

The contest was created by the Business Systems Support group in the IT department and attracted teams from across the city’s 14 departments to learn about the new ways that they could visualize and analyze data. In other words, IT functioned as a pro-active consultant to business units to improve their present practices.

Showing Electoral College Impact With Overlapped Bars

Robert Kosara has created an overlapped bar chart that describes the history of US Presidential votes, which is discussed in his EagerEyes blog. This view is interesting because the bars for the percent Electoral vote is on the top when it is less than the percent of Popular vote and on the bottom when it is greater. Although he used Excel computations to generate the view, it is easy to generate in Tableau by defining an extra column. Playing with the resulting workbook, I found that it is effective to sort the bars by the percent of the popular vote because you can clearly see all the presidents that were helped by the Electoral college to get above 50%.

More can be simpler when telling data stories

The Junk Charts blog had a posting about the importance of making a data view “as simple as possible but no simpler”, which used a great example from Professor Gelman’s recent book “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State”. His scatter view does clearly show the interaction of social and economic views. It is also relatively easy to see the social clustering. However, it is harder to see the economic cluster. I think you can add more to Gelman's data view to tell his story more effectively.

Life Expectancy in OECD Countries

The Junk Charts blog had a posting about web publishing that included a comment by reader 'DavidS'. He suggested using quartiles in a chart about life expectancy in OECD countries. Since the data was easy to download, I explored his suggestion in Tableau. Although the original chart is a good summary of the upward trend of life expectancy, David is correct that a more statistical view showing outliers demonstrates that the variance has increased even though the range has reduced.

Building Cycle Charts to Look at Trend Data

The January 2008 newsletter from Perceptual Edge is an excellent description of Cycle Plots by Naomi B Robbins Ph.D, which are a less known way to look at trend data. On her website, you can find a link that describes how you can create these views in Excel and provided the input data. I think it is great when people give you access to the data that is shown in examples. I used the same data to build a cycle chart in Tableau in a couple of minutes.

Comparing Standardized Math Tests: Check Out Your WA School District

I was quoted today in a Bruce Ramsey editorial at the Seattle Times about needing quality math instruction to help our children be competitive in the global economy. Much to my surprise, Bruce included the fact that I work at Tableau Software. He probably saw the tie to the global economy. Like all successful startups, Tableau Software is hiring. We also compete globally so we definitely want our job applicants to have a solid background in mathematics. However, my quote was as a private person.