Published on the 14/12/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Better BI depends on taking cognisance of how people think and learn…

Business intelligence software is by now mature and that means the search for a better way to do it is coming down to a focus on the minutiae. After all, BI has its roots all the way back in the 1960s, when, in between free love and electric guitar music, time was found to create decision support systems. These days, companies like Qlik are looking to boost the capabilities of BI by focusing on how people learn and providing the tools that fit with the different ways humans assimilate information.

At least, that’s the gist of what James Belsey, ANZ presales manager at the software vendor, is driving at. In a statement, he said improved decision-making from insights must be based on human learning rather than a sequence of processes. “A productive perspective is key for the creation of outcomes in how we work. New technologies, such as self-service BI, are providing the tools to build perspectives with decision-relevant data. Through exploring data and applying it to the particular context, employees can form actionable perspectives to help the business succeed.”

The real-world benefits of BI, said Belsey, are largely derived from assisting institutional learning, which is built on individual learning. “As such, to get the most benefit from data for the most decision makers, BI needs to better align with how people learn much more completely than it has before.”

It is a drift into the psychology of learning, as Belsey said the primary learning styles are auditory/reading, visual or kinaesthetic. “Soon, business intelligence will make use of information delivery media to engage all three learning styles. For example, for auditory learners, auto-generated narratives in written or spoken form will describe the shape of the data selected or the contents of a chart.  Having a technology such as Amazon Echo ‘speak’ these narratives may provide a compelling option for people who learn through hearing.”

Good with your hands? A lot of people are and they won’t be left behind either, as Belsey reckoned that in the future, “Haptic [touch] feedback and 3D printing will likely play a role in creating tangible outputs for the kinaesthetic learners who assimilate information best with a ‘hands-on’ experience by physically touching the associations of their learning.”

He said that in Qlik’s experience and research on multi-touch user interfaces found that people retain and ascribe more importance to data if they touch it, even when all they’re touching is a piece of cold glass. “This is why designing BI software products specifically for the touchscreen experience is about more than just mobile devices.”

That’s fairly fascinating for people who wonder what data actually looks like (here’s a hint: 100100100010001 etc.) and if it has any physical attributes, such as weight (it does – apparently, according to a 2007 estimate, the internet weighed either 0.2 millionths of an ounce, or 2 ounces).

Finally, for visually-led learners, Belsey said the options will grow both in terms of new visual forms and in the output devices visuals are rendered on. “This could mean taking advantage of large, ever-higher resolution displays to enable the rendering of massive data sets and perhaps practical VR experiences that allow analysts to work within and explore immersive data spaces.”

Overall, he said more support for a range of learning types is crucial if BI is to deliver as much value to decision makers as it can from the data-driven possibilities open to them. “However, delivering information in more forms is only useful if people can make sense of the data — that is, if they know how to read it, if they are data literate.”

To that end, Belsey said that ‘perhaps’ organisations should be mandating training in data literacy.  “After all, data literate employees are a driver of competitive advantage and with more data created than ever before, this will only become more important. As data literacy becomes more prevalent, we’ll see more demands for and of data, which can only result in reaching better, faster decisions with BI when it caters to a full range of learning styles.”