When an organization chooses one course of action over alternatives, this task typically falls on a decision maker with relevant knowledge, experience, and understanding of context. Decision makers rely on data analysis, which is either delegated to analysts, or done on their own. Often the decision maker combines data, likely uncertain or incomplete, with non-formalized knowledge within a multi-objective problem space, weighing the recommendations of analysts within broader contexts and goals. As most past research in visual analytics has focused on understanding the needs and challenges of data analysts, less is known about the tasks and challenges of organizational decision makers, and how visualization support tools might help. Here we characterize the decision maker as a domain expert, review relevant literature in management theories, and report the results of an empirical survey and interviews with people who make organizational decisions. We identify challenges and opportunities for novel visualization tools, including trade-off overviews, scenario-based analysis, interrogation tools, flexible data input and collaboration support. Our findings stress the need to expand visualization design beyond data analysis into tools for information management.

中文翻译：

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组织内决策者未满足的数据可视化需求


当一个组织选择一种行动方案而不是其他方案时，这项任务通常落在具有相关知识、经验和对环境的理解的决策者身上。决策者依赖数据分析，数据分析要么委托给分析师，要么自己完成。通常，决策者将可能不确定或不完整的数据与多目标问题空间中的非形式化知识相结合，在更广泛的背景和目标中权衡分析师的建议。由于过去大多数可视化分析研究都侧重于了解数据分析师的需求和挑战，因此人们对组织决策者的任务和挑战以及可视化支持工具如何提供帮助知之甚少。在这里，我们将决策者描述为领域专家，回顾管理理论中的相关文献，并报告实证调查和与组织决策者访谈的结果。我们确定新型可视化工具的挑战和机遇，包括权衡概述、基于场景的分析、询问工具、灵活的数据输入和协作支持。我们的研究结果强调需要将可视化设计从数据分析扩展到信息管理工具。