Data-driven decision making—orienting business decisions around data—drives major IT initiatives across all business sectors. Although buzzwords such as “data-driven decisions” and its “big data” and “data science” cousins might be overused, underneath them lie real opportunities for organizations to understand and reflect on their processes and customers. Collecting the information is only the first step. A great deal of research has investigated the process by which people work with data: how they ask questions about it, make sense of it, and communicate with it. A critical part of this chain is information visualization tools. Visualization provides a powerful way to make sense of data. By mapping data attributes to visual properties such as position, size, shape, and color, visualization designers leverage perceptual skills to help users discern and interpret patterns in data. For a first foray into the information visualization field, see Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think1 and “Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis.”

中文翻译：

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商业智能分析【客座编辑介绍】

数据驱动的决策——围绕数据制定业务决策——推动所有业务部门的主要 IT 计划。尽管诸如“数据驱动的决策”及其“大数据”和“数据科学”等流行词可能被过度使用，但在其背后是组织理解和反思其流程和客户的真正机会。收集信息只是第一步。大量研究调查了人们处理数据的过程：他们如何提出问题、理解数据并与之交流。该链的一个关键部分是信息可视化工具。可视化提供了一种强大的方式来理解数据。通过将数据属性映射到位置、大小、形状和颜色等视觉属性，可视化设计师利用感知技能来帮助用户辨别和解释数据中的模式。要首次涉足信息可视化领域，请参阅信息可视化中的读物：使用视觉进行思考 1 和“视觉分析的交互式动态”。