Some great news for Aussie fans of visualisation legend Stephen Few - he is coming to Australia next year to deliver a 3-day workshop in Sydney. You can download a course brochure with all the details here. Organised by Altis Consulting who also brought Ralph Kimball to these shores it is looking like one of those not-to-be-missed opportunities if you’re serious about your BI.
My personal view is that we still don’t pay enough attention to the final presentation of information, we spend huge amounts of effort, time and money getting our beautiful data structures and architectures in place and then just punt out a few charts using whatever defaults the BI tool of choice happens to use. The presentation of data is an opportunity to get that extra value out of your BI investment, producing visualisations that not only look good but which assist in understanding and communicating the real messages hidden in the data.
Here’s a bit of background from Stephen from his Perceptual Edge website
…I write the monthly Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, speak regularly at conferences (such as The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) and DAMA), and teach in the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2004 I wrote the first comprehensive and practical guide to business graphics entitled Show Me the Numbers, in 2006 I wrote the first and only guide to the visual design of dashboards, entitled Information Dashboard Design and in 2009 I wrote the first introduction for non-statisticians to visual data analysis entitled Now You See It….
