I’m a very
visual person. I tend to use my hands when I talk. I remember faces, but I’m terrible with
names. When I learn something new, I need to see it to really understand it. So
I was very excited when I was asked to evaluate one of the latest offerings
from SAP, called Lumira.
Basically,
it’s a “data discovery” tool. That means
instead of having to spend time manually aggregating data from multiple sources
and in diverse formats, SAP Lumira pulls the data directly from wherever it resides
and lets you organise and manipulate it however you want.
OK, maybe the
earth’s not moving for you yet. But this is where it gets interesting: once
you’ve prepared your data, you can create visualisations to find the kinds of
business insights and trends that are impossible to glean from staring at rows
of numbers.
It’s a simple
matter of dragging and dropping the data labels onto what is more or less a
“blank canvas” in the middle of your screen, and choosing how you want to
visualize the results. You can select anything from a straightforward bar,
radar or scatter chart, to a sophisticated multi-dimensional chart, geographic
bubble chart, tree map or tag cloud. You can see the big picture at a glance
and then drill down into the details by filtering data in columns, facets or
charts.
What’s really
liberating is that it enables people like me (numerically literate but not an
analytical expert) to look for relationships and uncover patterns in data
without adding to IT’s workload. No more waiting for them to write a custom
query or report each time a new question arises.
I downloaded
the free trial of SAP Lumira yesterday afternoon and got so immersed playing
with it that by the time I looked up again, everyone had gone home and the
cleaner was trying to trying to vacuum around my feet. I visualize that I’m going to be finding lots
of answers to questions I never knew I had with my new software over the coming
days!
For more information, click here.
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