Manyeyes V4

ManyEyes

What is it?

Web 3 brings together the tools that make technologies work better for the people that use them. As a tool which puts this into practice, ManyEyes brings together visualization tools that make the analysis of information easier to understand and enable staff to make the best use of such analysis to inform decisions on how they improve their services.

Why are we researching this?

ManyEyes can help tackle the information overload – making quantitative (such as statistics) and qualitative information (like policies, evaluations or even online conversations) more meaningful to those people who haven’t necessarily created the knowledge in the first place. For example, a statistician may have created datasets on a customer group but it’s the service manager that is best placed to make use of them to personalise the service. A web developer may have set up a tool that enables the public to comment on a particular issue, but it is the policy officer that needs to use that feedback when formulating policies. ManyEyes can also help us open up our expertise from staff to the public – a priority in the “Future Challenges” agenda - so they can make better decisions on areas that affect them. For example, GapMinder and the New York Times Visualization Lab have been very effective in enabling people to manipulate information such as longitudinal statistics to measure the impact of a policy over time and place, government spending or crime rates. In other words, it can allow policy makers and resource managers to pick up on new trends and unmet needs by visualising different types of information, while allowing the public to become more informed citizens. ManyEyes Wikified can enable staff to collaborate in providing the necessary context to these visualisations.

How can you develop this?

• • • • •

Analyse how organisations have used ManyEyes and other visualisation techniques to enable their staff to make the best use of such analysis to inform decisions on how they improve their services Identify other visualisation tools so as to define appropriate benchmarks by which to evaluate ManyEyes, such as Swivel and GapMinder Bring together internal stakeholders who have been identified as potential beneficiaries (see below) to provide mock data, text and other information for the beta program Participate in stakeholder interview and beta program with IBM Feed into wider review of Knowledge Management and Semantic Web

What resources do we need?

Time

Technology

Research

Money

Training

A lot of Some Not a lot of

What can you develop?

It can be used to visualize information in a variety of ways and as such there are different types of staff that would benefit from individual uses of ManyEyes (see table below). Visualization Relationship between…

Beneficiary Different types of statistics (access to a service versus level of satisfaction) around a particular variable (such as a place, service or customer group)

Service managers

People, business units and organisations connected between each

Programme and partnership coordinators, business planning leads and LAA

Different dimensions of…

Translation of unstructured information to structured knowledge to…

other, so you can evaluate how well they’re delivering together towards a project’s objectives (i.e. Pic & Mix), a corporate (i.e. Future Challenges) or even local agenda (i.e. responsible for an LAA outcome or National Indicator)

outcome / National Indicator leads

Different words through pattern matching or tag clouds Analysis (such as a technique or resources) Numeric values through circles to compare different aspects of a common variable The distribution of resources or priorities within a project or department Change over different options over the same variable, such as time Change for a same variable over different measurements (such as between level of expertise, technology and time required) Hierarchical structures where specific issues have been divided into categories (i.e. spending on children’s services divided into different teams)

Policy and research officers

More traditional graphing, such as line graphs and pie charts

Service managers

Uncover all the different contexts and relationships between specific keywords and turn the information into

Consultation and press officers

Business analysts Data analysts

Resource managers

Service managers Service managers and performance monitoring officers

Organisational and workforce development officers

structured “issue trees” Graph the importance of specific words over others in documents

Policy and research officers

What does the analysis show us? ManyEyes is an online based data visualization tool, using Java applet technology (which can be downloaded here and needs to be Java 1.4 or above). It is recommended to run on either Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.0.6 – naturally it’s preferable if more updated versions are used. IBM has advised that it may not be bug-free as it is still a proof of concept. The colour palettes have been chosen to make sure that people who are colour blind can visualize the data, while the data is set out in a text format that can be used by screenreaders. Similar applications currently used within the Council, such as Xcelsius – used by Personnel Information Systems, Employee Services, KASS Finance and Business Performance Monitoring, require a high level of expertise and experience of both Xcelsius and Excel.

How will we measure impact?

Co

Inputs

Measure

Ask participants what they value from visualising the relationships between different types of information or the different dimensions of a same set of information, in other words, what metrics

User-defined measures

Outputs

Measure

sts Process Userdefined measures

Scorecard Perspective

Effectiveness

they would want to measure success. Perceived general usefulness

Perceived value as a resource for work Perceived efficacy

Perceived proportionality

1. 2. 3. 4.

Never Hardly ever Sometimes Almost always 5. Always 1. None 2. Low 3. Significant 4. High 5. Necessary Improvements in 1. Performance 2. Project management 3. Resource management 4. Business analysis • •

Usability Knowledge transfer

New types of information created or uploaded to the platform

What effort and time I put into the pilot What I get back

Storytelling can be quantified – i.e. X group introduced y measure and generated z value