GIVING THE BOSS THE BIG PICTURE: DEMONSTRATING CONVERGENCE VISUALIZATION DESIGN PRINCIPLES USING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS TOOLS

Business Intelligence and Analytics (BIA) tools have been widely commercialized to ease the process of retrieving, analyzing and presenting the information. Some of the major BIA tools’ applicants are the experts and decision makers whoare known as the higher level management in an organization. They use BIA tools to derive for better business decisions. However, the management's activities involve Complex Cognitive Activities (CCA) such as decision making, analysis, forecasting, strategizing and sense making. These activities require higher level thinking in which the management team needs to analyze and synthesize the information. While there are various kinds of visualization within BIA tools having been developed to present the information, there is a lack of initiatives to facilitate higher level thinking effectively. One of the lacking initiatives is about visualizing the interconnectedness within information complexities in a way that can help experts and decision makers gain insight from the overall situation (the big picture). Therefore, this paper intends to demonstrate convergence visualization design principles that are able to complement current BIA tools in order to provide the big picture for higher level thinking.Based on the flow concept, the demonstration structured multiple visual elements to become a flow of sequential phases of a sponsorship process as the higher level of visual structure. Then the complementary between higher and lower level visual structure facilitates the exploration of overview and in-depth information for the higher level thinking process.