Visualizing Rich Media

The market is slowly moving towards the ability to visualize increasingly complex information entities that are driven by real-time dynamics. I’m not referring to the rich media equivalent of an “executive dashboard”, but rather to a solution that moves beyond reporting towards discovery. The real trick to visualization is to discovered hidden patterns or inferences that can’t be obtained by looking at historical data, but are a function of what is happening right now, in real time. Or, taking it one step further…

OLAP systems have come close to this type of capability, and are widely used by most IT planning shops and BPM providers, but it still leaves the end user with a best-case scenario of having information that allows them to react quickly. The real trick is not to react, but to anticipate, and to anticipate the unexpected. Now of course by definition you can’t anticipate the unexpected, but with the proper visualization/analytic tool wedded to a predictive engine you can actually create new information entities that exist as a series of “what if” scenarios. If these scenarios are driven along a probability axis using a smoothing algorithm, you actually end up with models that allow you to anticipate unexpected dynamics through the integration of rich media information sources tied to behavioral projections. More on this as we develop the concept further….