Perceptive Information Strategies

Walking down the street in San Francisco, I passed a newspaper box – something that in our increasingly digital age may someday be found only at the Smithsonian Museum. “Obama Pivots to Job Creation,” the San Francisco Chronicle headline announced. Wow, there it is again, I thought to myself, the word “pivot.”  All week, in vendor briefings, in my research, on TV during talking-head discussions of Obama’s strategy and now on the front page of a newspaper, I had been encountering this word. So, I took a picture of the box.

The verb form of the word came from its use as a noun, which means “a shaft or pin on which something turns” (Merriam-Webster’s). The implicit meaning of the headline, appearing the day after Obama’s State of the Union speech, was that the Obama Administration was going to turn its attention away from the now-stalled healthcare reform effort and toward the economic problem of creating jobs. This “pivot” would be quick and complete, like a machine would do it. No angst or mess: Done.

However, given that journalists and opinion-makers seemed to have picked up the word directly from Obama’s strategists, I wonder if the strategists’ use of the word comes more from basketball. Obama is as we know a major fan, and he plays the game. In basketball, once you set your pivot foot, you can spin around, but you cannot move that foot or else you’ll be called for traveling. I found a good explanation (and coaching tip, in case you need it) on YouTube. So, maybe it means that Obama has set his pivot foot – perhaps he did so on the day he took office – but he has the ability to spin around to pass or put up a (job creation) “shot” when opportunity or necessity presents itself. However, he cannot move his pivot foot or else he’ll be called for traveling. The whistle will blow, and he’ll have to turn the ball over.

In the world of business intelligence, online analytical processing (OLAP) and analysis using spreadsheets such as Microsoft Office Excel, “pivot” makes you think of pivot tables, or as Wikipedia defines them:

A pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets. Pivot tables were created in 1979 by Paul Spinks. Among other functions, they can automatically sort, count, and total the data stored in one table or spreadsheet and create a second table displaying the summarized data. Pivot tables are also useful for creating cross tabs. The user sets up and changes the summary’s structure by dragging and dropping fields graphically. This “rotation” or pivoting of the summary table gives the concept its name. The term pivot table is a generic phrase used by multiple vendors. However, the specific form PivotTable is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.

Research surveys often show that spreadsheet users do not make full use of pivot tables because they don’t know how to use them effectively and are afraid of making errors. However, pivot tables are obviously incredibly powerful for seeing data from different perspectives and uncovering patterns that may not have been obvious when analyzing the data in a more limited fashion. Microsoft has introduced PowerPivot for Excel 2010 (and for SharePoint 2010); I found this blog, which does a great job of explaining PowerPivot, so I won’t go into it here. However, I will chime in to say that it is perhaps the most important development in BI this year thus far. PowerPivot begins to bring together the worlds of BI and spreadsheets: or, put differently, it enables users to have some of the major benefits of BI while remaining spreadsheet users.

“Pivot” was an important topic during my briefing last week with Visual Mining, the producer of NetCharts, a tool for developing BI dashboards and data visualization. The focus of the briefing was NetCharts Performance Dashboards V2, which the company says adds “Excel-like” table and reporting functionality. In the demo, I was impressed by the ease and flexibility with which you could work with pivot tables and the data to see different views – and not just simple views but glorious, graphical data visualizations. “We want to enable CFOs to move beyond being record keeping to being more in control,” said Tristan Ziegler, president and CEO. While the challenges faced by the office of Finance are a major focus for Visual Mining, the product is useful for other scenarios, such as contact centers, where there are many data sources and users who may be used to spreadsheets but are not expert data analysts.

Could the Obama Administration’s decision makers benefit from having more views of their data? No doubt. It might help them discover correlations between issues such as job creation and health care that weren’t apparent when they were totally focused on one topic or the other. And I don’t think you can be called for traveling.