Visualising information - A VIP Editorial
Jinfo Blog

By Helen Clegg

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Welcome to the March edition of VIP. There’s a wealth of information packed in this month’s pages. Reading through the articles, it struck me that there were three broad themes emerging – visualisation, the changing nature of the information landscape and the need for information professionals to help companies and organisations navigate through this fast-changing landscape.

The first of the reviews covers MarketVisual, a product from IntellectSpace which maps business relationships between companies and individuals based on three degrees of separation. What’s great about this tool is the way it displays the search results: relationships between entities are depicted visually, using either the classic “star” layout, or path layout. Being able to see relationships between data in this way is extremely helpful. It’s usually quicker to absorb information when displayed visually and easier to make sense of the information too. I’m reminded of the map by Charles Joseph Minard showing the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. The map, illustrated in Edward Tufte’s book “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is a work of art. (I was so impressed with it that I bought the poster!) More importantly, it conveys a depth and breadth of information that would be impossible to replicate in text format. Some commercial online database vendors have already started to play with visualisation techniques – witness the way Factiva uses bar charts to visually depict the number of hits for search terms/companies alongside the classic display of results – and I think visualisation is a trend to watch and that we’ll see more visualisation tools in the near future.

MarketVisual draws on a number of sources for its data, ranging from regulatory filings and organisation websites to news sources and executive biographies. Plans to develop the product include an application which will integrate the database with social media site LinkedIn. Given that their LinkedIn profile is probably the one social media application that almost all business executives keep up-to-date, MarketVisual is well-placed to benefit from this ready pool of biographical information that is just waiting to be tapped.

VIP’s second review looks at Morningstar Direct, a web-based software application providing research and reporting capabilities on over 350,000 securities. So if you’re an information professional in the financial services sector, this in-depth review is definitely worth a read. It summarises nicely all the great features of the product, as well as potential drawbacks. One of these that caught my eye was the fact that the product is a software application that has to be installed on the client’s local servers, although the data resides on Morningstar’s servers and is accessed via the internet. For some organisations and their IT departments, this might pose a problem that has to be worked around, as our reviewer found out. However the good news is that Morningstar is in the process of developing a 100% web-based version and hopes to roll it out in 2012. This brings me to the second broad theme in this month’s VIP – the changing nature of the information landscape. Not only is this visible through the constant stream of new products that are emerging, for example the Morningstar Direct platform, Bloomberg and Kroll’s new credit rating tools and Bureau van Dijk’s new China Connect tool (see Tap The Wire) but also through the way products are accessed. Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) is becoming much more evident and the way to go.

And finally to the theme of navigators. There’s been so much debate about the future role of information professionals within organisations as the once familiar landscape of dot command languages needing professional expertise has shifted to web-based services and end user internet searching. Yet despite all the change, I believe that organisations need information professionals more than ever – if only to help them navigate through the fast-changing landscape, to critically assess new tools and services and assist the organisation in cutting down on maverick information product spend, procuring the best solutions at the best prices.

Read on and enjoy this month’s edition of VIP. You won’t be disappointed.

Helen Clegg

Helen Clegg is Director of Knowledge Management in A.T. Kearney’s Procurement & Analytic Solutions unit. She has over 20 years’ experience of international business research and knowledge management.

This editorial appears in VIP Magazine No. 88, March 2011. Purchase online >>

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