Abstract. Stories help us communicate knowledge, share and interpret experiences. In this paper we discuss the use of storytelling in Business Intelligence (BI) analysis. We derive the actual practices in creating and sharing BI stories from in-depth interviews with expert BI analysts (both story "creators" and "readers"). These interviews revealed the need to extend current BI visual analysis applications to enable storytelling, as well as new requirements related to BI visual storytelling. Based on these requirements we designed and implemented a storytelling prototype tool that is integrated in an analysis tool used by our experts, and allows easy transition from analysis to story creation and sharing. We report experts' recommendations and reactions to the use of the prototype to create stories, as well as novices' reactions to reading these stories. Keywords: Visual Storytelling, Business Intelligence.
IntroductionStories are one of humanity's communication structures and storytelling a means of passing on wisdom and culture. Individually and collectively, stories help us make sense of our past and reason about the future. Johnson 17] and Maclntyre [21] argue that story narrative also goes beyond communication, it is also a process of extracting meaning from events, that is central to human experience and conduct.It is thus not surprising that intelligence analysts, who make sense of data, identify links between disparate pieces of intelligence, and communicate their findings to decision makers, are interested in storytelling. Their analysis process is supported by the construction of stories and narratives, both during sense-making and during presentation of results. Bier et al. [3] point out that a story is a powerful abstraction to conceptualize threats and understand patterns as part of the analytical process, and story structures and storytelling is the means to present the analysis results. As analysts continue to work with increasingly large data sets, data visualization has become an incredibly important asset both during sensemaking analysis, and when communicating findings to other analysts, decision makers or to a broader public [15,27].Given the importance of storytelling in different steps of the analysis process it is clear there is a need to enhance visual analysis tools with storytelling support. Nevertheless this process is not simple [33,20], as analysts need to work within very large data resources and highlight and explain items or events of importance and their connections to their audiences. Despite the growing use and research work on storytelling and narrative visualization in the visualization domain [26,9,15], related research on the domain of BI has not equally progressed. Our work attempts to rectify this.In Business Intelligence (BI) analysis, the most popular visualization tools are dashboards. Dashboards [8] are collections of visual components (such as charts or tables) on a single view [12], that permit analysts to explore their data and quickly view different aspects of co...