Business Intelligence Visualization System for Organizational Understanding, Analysis, and Collaboration (BIVOUAC)

Military information systems, including those used in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), aggregate massive amounts of heterogeneous data, but typically provide ineffective visualization tools to explore those datasets in support of high-quality, collaborative decision-making by distributed teams. Linking datasets entails authorship of complex transformation and loading scripts. Existing reporting systems require time-consuming manual coding of arcane templates, yielding rudimentary visualizations with primitive interactivity. Finally, remote collaborators are often relegated to the sidelines, able to collaborate only by making static offline changes to a shared document or report. To address these needs, we propose to design and demonstrate a Business Intelligence Visualization System for Organizational Understanding, Analysis, and Collaboration (BIVOUAC). BIVOUAC seamlessly integrates disparate datasets and presents a taxonomy of rich, detailed, visual metaphors for exploratory decision-making. A multimodal interactive architecture allows users with diverse displays and input devices to directly manipulate visualizations and navigate large datasets, using interactivity controls that extend the conceptual model of the visualization. Teams can collaborate locally or remotely, simultaneously or asynchronously, with visual cues and affordances that reinforce cooperation within a shared workspace. The development of this technology will enable dramatic improvements in decision-making in the Navy’s ERP program and for program managers throughout the DoD.