Visualizing Work: New Ways to Map How Businesses Operate

1. Summary

Many approaches that visually represent how business operates—organization or Gantt charts, for example—date from the beginning of the twentieth century. These outdated visualizations simply don’t match up with the way businesses operate in 2015. They fail to provide strategic and quick insight into what people are actually doing at work. The rise of more recent business intelligence and business process for visualizing work doesn’t provide much insight into the social dimension of work, either, when it comes to where people are communicating, interacting, and sharing.

True insight into how today’s businesses operate will come from tools that build on visualizing work based on the social networks within and across organizations. This report takes a close look at many of the approaches to visualize work.

Key highlights from this report include:

• The older the technique for visualizing work, the more out of step it is with modern work.
• In an accelerating and big data world, techniques that rely on dynamically tapping into live data rather than manual updating have great advantages.
• The work graph—the social network of people in a business, plus the information objects that they share in the performance of their work—will likely be the central motif for visualizing work in the years to come and is where the most exciting research and development is taking place today.

Thumbnail image courtesy of hh5800/iStock.