ManyEyes

What is it?

Web 3 brings together the tools that make technologies work better for the people that use
them. As a tool which puts this into practice, ManyEyes brings together visualization tools
that make the analysis of information easier to understand and enable staff to make the best
use of such analysis to inform decisions on how they improve their services.

Why are we researching this?

ManyEyes can help tackle the information overload – making quantitative (such as statistics)
and qualitative information (like policies, evaluations or even online conversations) more
meaningful to those people who haven’t necessarily created the knowledge in the first place.

For example, a statistician may have created datasets on a customer group but it’s the
service manager that is best placed to make use of them to personalise the service. A web
developer may have set up a tool that enables the public to comment on a particular issue,
but it is the policy officer that needs to use that feedback when formulating policies.

ManyEyes can also help us open up our expertise from staff to the public – a priority in the
“Future Challenges” agenda - so they can make better decisions on areas that affect them.

For example, GapMinder and the New York Times Visualization Lab have been very
effective in enabling people to manipulate information such as longitudinal statistics to
measure the impact of a policy over time and place, government spending or crime rates.

In other words, it can allow policy makers and resource managers to pick up on new trends
and unmet needs by visualising different types of information, while allowing the public to
become more informed citizens.

ManyEyes Wikified can enable staff to collaborate in providing the necessary context to
these visualisations.

How can you develop this?

• Analyse how organisations have used ManyEyes and other visualisation techniques to
enable their staff to make the best use of such analysis to inform decisions on how they
improve their services
• Identify other visualisation tools so as to define appropriate benchmarks by which to
evaluate ManyEyes, such as Swivel and GapMinder
• Bring together internal stakeholders who have been identified as potential beneficiaries
(see below) to provide mock data, text and other information for the beta program
• Participate in stakeholder interview and beta program with IBM
• Feed into wider review of Knowledge Management and Semantic Web

What resources do we need?

Time Technology Research Money Training

A lot of

Some

Not a lot of

What can you develop?

It can be used to visualize information in a variety of ways and as such there are different
types of staff that would benefit from individual uses of ManyEyes (see table below).

Visualization Beneficiary

Relationship between… Different types of Service managers

statistics (access to a
service versus level of
satisfaction) around a
particular variable (such
as a place, service or
customer group)

People, business units Programme and partnership

and organisations coordinators, business
connected between each planning leads and LAA

Different dimensions of…
Translation of unstructured
information to structured
knowledge to…
other, so you can outcome / National Indicator
evaluate how well they’re leads
delivering together
towards a project’s
objectives (i.e. Pic &
Mix), a corporate (i.e.
Future Challenges) or
even local agenda (i.e.
responsible for an LAA
outcome or National
Indicator)
Different words through Policy and research officers
pattern matching or tag
clouds
Analysis (such as a Business analysts
technique or resources)
Numeric values through Data analysts
circles to compare
different aspects of a
common variable
The distribution of Resource managers
resources or priorities
within a project or
department
Change over different Service managers
options over the same
variable, such as time
Change for a same Service managers and
variable over different performance monitoring
measurements (such as officers
between level of
expertise, technology
and time required)
Hierarchical structures Organisational and workforce
where specific issues development officers
have been divided into
categories (i.e. spending
on children’s services
divided into different
teams)
More traditional graphing, Service managers
such as line graphs and
pie charts
Uncover all the different Consultation and press officers
contexts and
relationships between
specific keywords and
turn the information into
 structured “issue trees”
Graph the importance of Policy and research officers
specific words over
others in documents

What does the analysis show us?

ManyEyes is an online based data visualization tool, using Java applet technology (which
can be downloaded here and needs to be Java 1.4 or above). It is recommended to run on
either Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.0.6 – naturally it’s preferable if more updated versions
are used. IBM has advised that it may not be bug-free as it is still a proof of concept.

The colour palettes have been chosen to make sure that people who are colour blind can
visualize the data, while the data is set out in a text format that can be used by
screenreaders.

Similar applications currently used within the Council, such as Xcelsius – used by Personnel
Information Systems, Employee Services, KASS Finance and Business Performance
Monitoring, require a high level of expertise and experience of both Xcelsius and Excel.

How will we measure impact?

Co Inputs Measure Outputs Measure Scorecard

sts Perspective

Process
Ask User-defined User-
participants measures defined
what they measures
value from
visualising the
relationships
between
different types
of information
or the different
dimensions of
a same set of
information, in
other words,
what metrics
 they would
want to
measure
success.
Effectiveness Perceived 1.Never
general 2.Hardly ever
usefulness 3.Sometimes
4.Almost
always
5. Always
Perceived 1. None
value as a 2. Low
resource for 3. Significant
work 4. High
5. Necessary
Perceived Improvements in
efficacy 1. Performance
2. Project
management
3. Resource
management
4. Business
analysis

Perceived • What effort and Storytelling

proportionality time I put into the can be
pilot quantified –
• What I get back i.e. X group
introduced
y measure
and
generated
z value

Usability

Knowledge New types of

transfer information
created or
uploaded to
the platform