For the past couple of years my colleague Alan Majer has been looking into new into new forms of interactive technology and the use of ‘gaming dashboards’ (ala World of Warcarft) in the organization. Web 2.0 tools enable employees to ‘visualize’ information in a whole new way. Widgets and Mashup are traditionally where we see visualization techniques incorporated.

I feel what differentiates visualization from a static graph or a chart is the ability or the users to manipulate and control the inputs and outputs of the tool. The first case I came across was a tool called Liveplasma and it allows users to visualize and expand their music/movie preferences by leveraging the data in the Amazon cloud. Sarah Perez at recently put up a great blog post about ‘The Best Tools for Visualization” that goes over a wide range of different tools and their uses.

If visualization is so powerful and useful, how can you get them into the hands of your employees? It only makes sense to arm them with the with tools that will allow them to make better decisions and exploit all of the information that corporations are now capturing. I was pointed to a tool called ‘TheBrain‘ a few weeks ago and I have included a quick blurb and an example of one of the solutions you could use it for below.

TheBrain software enables helpdesk and IT managers to organize and share all relevant information online quickly and easily. Using TheBrain’s visual interface you can see all related issues and solutions. See a complete mapping of your IT network so you immediately know what server runs what application and the impact of any changes.

While the example above is rather simple (a user defined interactive tag/knowledge cloud), you can see that benefits this would have for IT HelpDesk staff. The key for organizations will be to open up information and databases to these new visualization tools and widgets. There is so much untapped potential residing in most companies and I believe that organizations that figure this out early will see marked improvement.