The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions

Introduction

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

—Henry David Thoreau

Professional writers and speakers like me live interesting lives. I'd hazard to guess that most of us work from home, although some maintain proper offices. And when you work from home, strange things can happen. For one, it can become difficult to separate work from leisure. There's no boss looking over your shoulder to see if you've completed that TPS report. Did you get that memo? If you want to take a nap in the early afternoon as I routinely do, no one's stopping you. In a way, people like me are always at work, even though we're not always working. It's fair to say that the notion of work-life balance can be challenging. Lines usually blur. Maybe they're even obliterated.

In many ways, working from home could not be more different from working for “the man.” Even today, many rigid corporate environments block employees from visiting certain websites via services like Websense. And forget the obvious sites (read: porn). At many companies, there's no guarantee that employees can access websites that serve legitimate business purposes, at least without a call to the IT help desk to unblock them. Examples include Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Of course, many employees in industrialized countries sport smartphones these days, minimizing the effectiveness of the Websenses of the world. As a result, many companies have reluctantly embraced the Bring Your Own Device movement. ...