Benign Data

Two weeks ago while whining about the things that I missed while I didn't have my laptop, I wrote that it seemed inevitable that we would begin to see monitors or projectors of various species begin to show up in non-traditional spaces, like the office lobby, the break-room, the living room, and the kitchen.  This would be the result of falling costs in display mediums and the increasing power of networked graphics processors.  Then just Monday the Google Public Data Explorer launched and I pontificated about the growing need to become more data savvy.  So naturally on the very next day I come across this excellent example of where cheap networked displays meets data savviness:    

      To truly understand what you're looking at here you ought to trot over and read the whole blog post, but the teaser version is that you're looking at an office status monitor at the offices of Panic, a software development company.  This one monitor contains vital information on the status of customer service tickets, calendars, revenue, development progress, and even public transportation data for employees who commute.  From the perspective of visual design it is impeccable and worth noting, but more importantly the data displayed here is crucial to their day to day business and consolidates and displays it in such a manner that it saves the individual employees the time and energy it would take to track down these pieces of information on a regular basis on their own--over and over again.

  This kind of status board is not a novel idea, in the sense that train stations and airports have had them forever and the corkboard is a pretty old contraption.   What's original here is the concept of placing vital real-time data in the most convenient place for employees to use it, rather than locking it inside of a server, behind a password and inside a mail client and a calendar client and a web browser.  Obviously there is some dangerous--in the sense of being sensitive--data that belongs behind a password on a central server.  But there is often a great deal of useful data that a company, organization, or family, could safely publicly display.  This is benign data and it very often gets bundled up with the dangerous data and locked away, making it less accessible and therefore less useful.  One of the things that can separate a good company from a great one is the way in which it leverages its data to make it more efficient and deliver better support to its customers.  You can get better leverage from having more granular control over what data gets put behind a password with limited user access and what data gets opened up for all or almost all to use.  So much time gets spent talking about and implement network security yet very little time is spent on how to give employees, customers, or individuals datasfaction--a term I'm coining to define the state of being when you have the information you need, when you need it, without having to work for it.  If the future is going to be about efficiencies--and of course it is--then data efficiency is going to have to become a second language for those of us who wish to compete in the world the internet is creating.