Current Work Practice and Users' Perspectives on Visualization and Interactivity in Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) provides methods for analyzing business-critical information and supports decision-making processes. Interactivity or the possibility to engage in an active discourse with the representation lies at the core of Information Visualization and Visual BI. However, current work practice and users' perspectives on visualization and interactivity in BI have not been investigated yet. As a first step in this direction, a qualitative empirical study was conducted among six IT-managers working in the field of BI. Main results are that interactive visual methods in BI are not used very often in practice. One of the main reasons reported is the fact that visualization is still two steps ahead and at the moment mostly more basic problems concerning data gathering, data modeling and data quality prevail. Moreover, most users are used to work with numbers and tables and are not aware of the possibilities in terms of visualization. However, the interviewed IT-managers acknowledged that using more interactive visual methods in BI would be beneficial for users.