Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Visible World How-To: Visualization
Visualization tools will require a new visual literacy for employees. While many companies rely on a creative or design team for visual communication, regular employees will more frequently be called upon to interpret and communicate data in a visual format.
To start, IFTF's maps are visualizations: the Future of Work map is visual abstraction of the Future of Work Perspectives. Sharing these with your staff and asking them to interpret data is a good exercise—and a way to help them understand why you might ask them to try a bunch of new and unusual things.
Visual-Literacy.org offers online tutorials in visualization tools, from flow charts to more complex metaphorical representations. The courses are currently in demo mode while they finish test runs and evaluations, but it's worth the time to create an account and test out the courses. If you find them valuable or interesting, having employees enroll in the courses might be worthwhile. They have also designed a fantastic Periodic Table of Visualization Methods which is a great tool when you feel a visualization is in order but aren't sure which kind is best suited to communicate your data.
Of course, as technology advances, so does the complexity of visualizations. They are becoming more dynamic everyday. Start by exploring tools relevant to your business or that involve technologies you may already be familiar with. Mashable.com has a great list of 16 visualization tools that range from Flickr photo tags to Zillow real estate heat maps. Andrew Vande Moere's Information Aesthetics Blog and Manuel Lima's Visual Complexity are also great resource for more advanced experimental stuff, and both have RSS feeds.
This short film about the way we access, collect, and share information is one of my favorites (via Information Aesthetics):
Familiarizing yourself with these technologies will help you figure out how something similar might be useful for data analysis in your organization. It can also help you identify visual designers and firms who could work with your organization to develop useful and dynamic tools.