Indeed, the tools inherently hunt out the data flyspecks. "However information is surfaced -- whether in reports or visual analysis or scorecards -- data quality issues are surfaced with it," says Christopher Oven, BI product marketing manager at Cognos. Just identifying the problem areas makes errors easier to find and fix, he adds. And the problems are typically less severe because organizations mature enough to use the visualization tools have usually already addressed data quality.

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Push from GIS and real-time data

Two technologies that are playing big roles in popularizing visualization systems are GIS and real-time data.Real-time data is used in financial trading or network management systems, and GIS is booming, thanks to the availability of sensor technologies and mobile devices.

"Any data which has an explicit or implicit geographic code can be mapped and analyzed geographically," says David Maguire, director of products at ESRI in Redlands, Calif. Explicit geocodes are latitude/longitude coordinates; implicit ones include addresses, postal codes or administrative units such as census tracts or work areas. "We're looking at how things ... in two or more dimensions ... change over space and/or over time, and we're representing that in the form of a map," he says.