What is the difference between graphic design and data visualization? What distinguishes our actions when we design a website from when we design an executive dashboard? What separates somebody who creates a meaningful icon from another who creates an insightful bar chart?

While both graphic design and data visualization aim to create effective visual communication, data visualization is principally concerned with data analysis. Even though we, who design dashboards and charts, are motivated to create something aesthetically pleasing, we are more passionate about what the data can tell us about our world. This desire to explore our universe via data, and then, communicate our discoveries is the reason that we dedicate our time to learning how best to visualize it.

In this is book, our mission is to create a data-driven business. We start our journey by defining a series of strategies to create and share knowledge using data visualization. In parallel, we propose how we can effectively organize ourselves, our projects, and the applications we develop so that our whole business starts to use insightful visual analysis as quickly as possible. Also, as we survey the entire perspective of our data visualization strategy, we review how we are going to implement it using, arguably, the best data exploration and discovery tool—QlikView.

Let's take a look at the following topics in this chapter: