Monday, October 3, 2011

My "Top Five" IT trends of the next half decade

Big data alone is not information, it's not enough to transmit the message over to your reader. You need visualization to leverage the bandwidth of the visual system to move a huge amount of information into the brain very quickly.

Infographics versus Data Visualization

The other day I started reading about Designing Data Visualizations and I discovered some key criteria to differentiate Infographics from "real" Data Visualization:

Infographics:
  • aesthetically rich,
  • relatively data-poor,
  • specific to the data at hand,
  • manually drawn.
Data Visualization
  • often aesthetically barren,
  • relatively data-rich,
  • easy to regenerate with different data,
  • algorithmically drawn.

The "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade

Today I was reading about the "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade:

  1. mobile,
  2. social,
  3. cloud,
  4. consumerization,
  5. big data.

And yes, it was their infographic that inspired this article altogether:

The big shifts in IT: cloud, social, mobile, consumerization, and big data

It does a better job at transmitting the idea than the list preceding it, doesn't it?

From Big Data to Information

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'd put big data first! And moreover, regardless how big is your data set, data alone is just stark. I believe that big data alone not enough to transmit your message over to your reader: data alone is not information.

It's the visualization that can leverage the incredible capabilities and bandwidth of the visual system to move a huge amount of information into the brain very quickly.
So, if we are to talk about the top shifts in Information Technology, I would definitely add visualization to the list:

Big Data + Visualization = Information