After reading a couple of reviews (notably by Stephen Few and Nathan Yau) of The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics, I picked up a copy myself out of curiosity.

For the most part, I agree with Stephen Few's critique of the book, but his vantage point is as an expert in the field. In author Dona Wong's defense, it's hard to write a book for newbies and present do's and don'ts that won't ruffle the feathers of anyone who knows better.

Being in BI, I see a lot of crappy reports with poorly chosen graphics. And many of these are coming from "seasoned veterans" in report writing. The problem is that "seasoned veterans" in report writing only means you really know how to use the tool, not necessarily how to communicate quantitative data visually.

I think that this book, despite its many flaws (Wong almost had me in a tizzy by referring to "sans serif" fonts as "sanserif" - that's as heinous as a Freedom Fry), is ideal for one particular audience. And that is people who have no knowledge of visualization, and who do not have the will or the patience to learn.

The book has two key strengths for newbies:

1. Everything is in bullet points (ideal for the attention challenged)
2. Wong's rules-of-thumbs are pretty black and white (ideal for the critically thinking challenged)

One glaring weakness, however, is that while the images in the book are lovely, they weren't really created by real world BI tools. You're not going to be easily able to reproduce these charts and graphs in Cognos Report Studio or any other tool to match Wong's aesthetic.

Stephen Few's books are easy reads, but only a small percentage of the people to whom I recommend his books actually read them (sadly, I think the reason behind this is that too many people just don't seem to care enough about their "craft" to improve). Edward Tufte's books contain prose that requires a significant amount of patience, and are much more appropriate for true believers than newbies.

Bullet points and "black and white" rules be damned, I think this book should be read by anyone who designs reports in Cognos or any other other BI tool. It's about 100 times better than what is usually described as "the most popular seminar each year" at Cognos Forum, where the presenter talks about Few and Tufte, and then goes ahead and presents the one of the most horrible PowerPoint decks I've ever seen.

If we're lucky, people who start with this book will develop an interest in visualization and then actually read something meatier like Information Dashboard Design or Beautiful Evidence.

Lately, when talking to my fellow business intelligence compadres, I've been talking a lot about Feature Checklists and Feature Excellence, and the lack of the latter in enterprise software.

Feature Checklists

Feature checklists are self-explanatory. At the core, they're just lists of features. In the enterprise software space, software buyers are rarely subject matter experts. An IT manager is told to buy some business intelligence software by some business stakeholder, and in the absence of any business intelligence expertise, goes about researching the competitive landscape by using Google searches and creating a spreadsheet with a feature comparison grid. You can't blame buyers for that approach. We all do it.

The problem lies in the fact that product managers know about this behaviour. And more often than not, the difference between a won or lost deal is a few checkmarks in prospect's feature grid. It doesn't matter that the feature is poorly implemented or not, it just matters that the feature exists.

So it shouldn't be surprising that in many enterprise software companies, some guru in Marketing who scans the "blogosphere", "twitterverse" and God forbid, analyst publications, tells product management that the next release absolutely needs to include Feature X, Y and Z. The Product Development Manager will jump on some web sites to see how the competitors are doing it, and then get his or her team coding away. In the final release, you get the functionality that Marketing asked for, but more often than not, none of the new functionality is best in class, which leads to my next buzzword, feature excellence.

Feature Excellence

Feature excellence is exactly that. Excellence at delivering a particular software feature.

Feature excellence is easy to talk about, but hard to deliver. It often requires some deep thought, and consideration of users in the field. Excellence isn't only about technical efficiency, but also usability. Software with programmer's interfaces often fail on the usability criteria.

Feature checklists and feature excellence do not necessarily go hand in hand, especially in the world of enterprise software. In the consumer software world, money is made off of volume, so usability for the Joe Sixpacks of the world is critical. Even Microsoft, a company known to compete on feature checklists (the evolution of Office is a great example), can manage more than a few wins in the feature excellence column.

Feature excellence is much more elusive in the enterprise software market. Buyer emphasis on feature checklists definitely has more than a little to do with it.

Feature Checklists for Business Intelligence

Jumping back to the battle between feature checklists and feature excellence in the business intelligence world, a great example of this happened this past November, when visualization expert Stephen Few politely (and objectively) eviscerated an analyst article that provided a visualization "feature checklist" for potential business intelligence customers. The whole exchange was entertaining to me, because I'm known for my love of analysts (grin).

In any case, Stephen Few followed up recently with his own criteria for vendor selection. When you compare his list to the original analyst article, you can see that his list is steering buyers towards feature excellence, rather than feature checklists.

If more prospective buyers paid attention to the real subject matter experts and less to the opinion-mills that are analyst firms, then you'll see a shift in the industry towards providing feature excellence. Let's hope that happens.