OMB Data Visualization Tool Requirements Analysis: Birst Dr. Brand Niemann Director and Senior Data Scientist Semantic Community AOL Government Blogger July 15,

Background DRAFT White Paper for OMB Pittsburgh, July 11, Start With the End in Mind, Avoid Tool Wars, and Develop Well- designed Spreadsheets That Can be “Dragged and Dropped” Onto a Tool That Creates Statistics and Visualizations in the Public and Private Clouds. Focus on Requirements Analysis by First Comparing Two Magic Quadrant Leaders on Common Data Sets (Tableau and Spotfire) Spotfire Was Able to Reproduce All the Tableau Data Visualizations With Dynamically Linked Visualizations. Broaden This Requirements Analysis to Include More Sample Data Sets and Tools. OMB Has Used Birst Which Is a Challenger in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. 2

Birst Express: Sign Up 3

Birst Express: Sign Up 4 See:

The Top 10 Business Questions That Drive Your BI Technology Requirements Question 1: Do you need to analyze data in your transactional applications (Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP, etc…) Question 2: Do you need to analyze data from multiple different sources? Question 3: Does your organization undergo sales territory alignments, job changes, mergers, or other organizational restructuring? Question 4: Do you need to compare performance today to snapshots of performance in the past? Question 5: Do you need to apply business rules or logic to data for analysis? Question 6: Do you need to distribute professionally formatted reports to executives, customers, or other organizations? Question 7: Does your organization have employees with different analytic skill levels? Question 8: Do you want to show reports or charts within the context of an existing application? Question 9: Does the organization need to perform “what-if” planning? Or project future performance? Question 10: Do you need to perform in-depth analytics that relates data from seemingly unrelated sources or tables? 5

Birst: Welcome 6

Birst: Sample Dashboard 7

Birst: Get Started 8

Birst: Sample Data Set 9

Birst: Help 10

Birst: Download Data 11

Birst: Sample Spreadsheet 12

Birst Data Example: Spotfire Cover Page 13

Birst Data Example: Spotfire Business Operations 14

Birst Data Example: Spotfire Data Ecosystem 15

Birst Data Example: Spotfire World Countries and Cities 16

Birst Data Example: Spotfire Web Player 17

Four Lessons Learned Using Dashboards in Government 18 Federal News Radio: Lessons for Managing Dashboards, November 10, 2011, Wiki and SlidesLessons for Managing DashboardsWikiSlides

Four Lessons Learned Using Dashboards in Government The report lists Four Lessons Learned as follows (with a more detailed description below): – Data quality is key to the credibility – Best practices resources are necessary in the design and use of dashboards – Dashboards are only tools; and – Effectiveness depends on use It also describes the Tufte principles of design, which state: – Dashboards should fit on a single page (or screen) – Dashboards should be simple – Dashboards should use the best display medium for communicating data effectively 19

Federal Transparency.gov 20 Data Scientist's Audition for the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel

FederalTransparency.gov Spotfire: Recovery.gov 21 Filters Details-on- Demand History of Spending Spending Versus Jobs Tufte-like Lights-On-Map Interactivity of Data in Visualizations Big Data Set Story and Metadata 599,743 Rows and 98 Columns

Some Conclusions and Recommendations OMB Has Used Birst and Semantic Community Was Able to Reproduce the Birst Sample Dashboard With Spotfire. Semantic Community Has Used The Four Lessons Learned Using Dashboards in Government and Tufte’s Principles of Design in Recreating 7 of the 11 Administration Dashboards. The FederalTransparency.gov Spotfire Dashboards Are This Data Scientist's Audition for the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel and Show That Spotfire Is Able to Create Multiple Industrial-Strength Dashboards. Semantic Community Will Continue to Use The Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader Tools and Their Sample Data Sets and to Recreate Visualizations and Dashboards. 22