OMB Data Visualization Tool Requirements Analysis: Microsoft Dr. Brand Niemann Director and Senior Data Scientist Semantic Community AOL Government Blogger July 19,

Background DRAFT White Paper for OMB Pittsburgh, July 11, Start With the End in Mind, Avoid Tool Wars, and Develop Well-designed Spreadsheets That Can be “Dragged and Dropped” Onto a Tool That Creates Statistics and Visualizations in the Public and Private Clouds. Focus on Requirements Analysis by First Comparing Magic Quadrant Leaders on Common Data Sets. Spotfire Was Able to Reproduce Birst, Tableau, and QlikView Data Visualizations With Dynamically Linked Visualizations. Broaden This Requirements Analysis to Include More Sample Data Sets and Tools. Microsoft Is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. 2

Gartner BI Magic Quadrant: Microsoft Microsoft Strengths and Cautions Excerpts The company's strategy has been to enhance the BI capabilities in three of its core offerings with each release — including Microsoft Office (specifically Excel), Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint — to increase their value and drive upgrades. Office 2013, Excel is no longer the former 1997, 64K row-limited, tab-limited spreadsheet. It finally begins to deliver on Microsoft's long-awaited strategic road map and vision to make Excel not only the most widely deployed BI tool, but also the most functional business-user-oriented BI capability for reporting, dashboards and visual-based data discovery analysis. Over the next year, Microsoft plans to introduce a number of high-value and competitive enhancements to Excel, including geospatial and 3D analysis, and self-service ETL with search across internal and external data sources. These enhancements, along with planned support for analyzing large and diverse data (PolyBase, Microsoft's platform to enable a single query across relational and Hadoop data sources, is due in the first half of 2013). Building on the in-memory capabilities of PowerPivot in SQL Server 2012, Microsoft introduced a fully in-memory version of Microsoft Analysis Services cubes, based on the same data structure as PowerPivot, to address the needs of organizations that are turning to newer in-memory OLAP architectures over traditional, multidimensional OLAP architectures to support dynamic and interactive analysis of large datasets. Multiproduct complexity is a challenge. Because Microsoft's BI platform capabilities exist across three different tools (Office, SQL Server and SharePoint) that also perform non-BI functions, integrating the necessary components and building the applications is left to the organization. Microsoft's do-it-yourself approach puts more of the BI solution's development and integration onus for the platform components on customers, compared with the all-in-one purpose-built BI platforms offered by most other vendors in the BI market. Microsoft lags behind most other BI vendors in delivering mobile BI capabilities. It has been slow to deliver BI on mobile devices. Note: Bolding by the author to highlight key points. Source: 3

Semantic Community Microsoft Office (specifically Excel) – Yes (and Access and Powerpoint) – My Note: Access (Multiple Tables and Queries) can be saved to Excel and imported into Spotfire. See Nwind.mdb in _and_Analysis_Tools/QlikView _and_Analysis_Tools/QlikView Microsoft SQL Server – Yes (via Spotfire) – My Note: SQL Server can be accessed via Spotfire. See: Microsoft SharePoint – No (MindTouch) – My Note: MindTouch is open source and more versatile than SharePoint for mashups. See 4

Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Knowledge Base 5 My Note: Federal Digital Government Strategy Compliant with “all content as data”. Well-defined URLs to each content type, sub-documents like PDF, and attachments.

National Statistics for Scotland: Web Page 6

National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Graphic 7

National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Table 8 My Note: “Tall and Narrow” Instead of “Short and Wide”.

National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Graphic 9

Spotfire – a new, innovative way to display water quality information 10

National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Table for Spotfire 11 My Note: Reformatted Because “Short and Wide” Instead of “Tall and Narrow”. Also Deleted.. Very Important!

Scotland Environmental Statistics2012: Spotfire Cover Page 12 My Note: This is essentially a mashup of everything in one web application file!

Scotland Environmental Statistics 2012 : Spotfire Drinking Water Quality:

Some Conclusions and Recommendations Semantic Community Was Able to Build the Complete Scotland Environmental Statistics 2012 in Spotfire Using MindTouch and Excel. Some Modifications to Excel Tables Are Necessary to Effectively Use Them in Spotfire. MindTouch and Spotfire Are More Versatile Than SharePoint and Excel For Mashups. Semantic Community Will Continue to Use The Gartner BI Magic Quadrant Leader Tools and Their Sample Data Sets and to Recreate Visualizations and Dashboards. 14