Some vendors estimate that only 15 percent to 30 percent of the workers who have access to BI tools within their companies actualy use them. Data visualization tools counter that, says Michael Smith, Cognos' BI marketing manager.

"Presenting complicated data in an easy-to-consume fashion makes it a lot easier for users to understand the data and to make decisions that improve their performance," he says. Business users want the equivalent of the USA Today newspaper's multicolor weather map of weather trends and patterns.

Rows and columns simply aren't as compelling or informative. "Typically, when you're looking at text, you're looking at one issue, one point, one piece of data," says Judith Hurwitz, principal of Hurwitz & Associates. The Waltham, Mass.-based consultancy studied the effect of presenting data graphically for dashboard provider Bowstreet Inc., which was recently acquired by IBM .

"When you're looking at a dashboard or GIS system or any of these tools, you're looking at an automatic aggregation of information ... say, from five different databases and public data sources," Hurwitz explains. "In the past, you manually coded and aggregated that information." In a recent Hurwitz survey of 113 IT executives, 95 percent of the respondents said dashboards were a way to provide increased consistency, reliability and accuracy to improve decision-making.

The new analysis tools can open up an organization, argues Spotfire CEO Christopher Ahlberg. "People are saying, 'Wow, I'm not going to be in a world where I'm just served a number, I'm going to have freedom to start exploring things," he says. Many organizations have access to the same data and run the same SAP or Oracle information systems as their competitors. "To differentiate themselves, they need to look at information in clever ways ... and create an information advantage," says Ahlberg.