on Mar 19th, 2007Fun with Statistics
I have been working on Business Intelligence for over a year now and have seen lots of high end tools and applications. I develop BI solutions for a Fortune 50 company using some really high end BI tools to do the analysis and reporting. Analytics and BI have become more and more streamlined and are really beginning to make a difference in organizations and have started impacting them in a big way. More and more people are taking notice of the power of intelligent reporting and have begun to invest in BI solutions. This trend is observed clearly by the sharp increase in outsourced BI work to Indian tech companies. Seems like SOA and BI are the only projects coming our way. And yes, this trend is here to stay.
All said and done, analysis of boring looking tabular reports have become passe’ , its the age of cool tools that make reports more fun. Some of my recent favorites have been Google Analytics, with its flash enabled reports and also some really neat functionality built in cleverly into deceptive looking graphics. I was also excited when i looked at Crystal’s Xcelsius and its slick new outlook. My most recent fun tool is definitely Gapminder, recently acquired by Google for its really awesome looking interface. Take a look at this report and see for yourself how reports can be fun 
some screenshots :
Interesting!! And true, that report was extremely fun.. Also the other report on Human development trends in Gapminder. Interesting results too.. Thanks for the links.