Empowering Business Users to Explore Visual Data Through Boundary Objects and Storytelling

This research is inspired by two important industry trends: (i) a growing demand for visual analytic (VA) across all industry sectors, and ii) serious shortage of VA skills on the market, especially among business professionals. This project focuses on the following practice-inspired research question: "How to empower business users to develop visual data exploration skills?" This paper describes a VA pilot project conducted at an industry, rather than organizational level. We focused on a challenge of gradual development of VA skills among industry professionals from the Australian Cooperative and Mutual Enterprises (CMEs) sector, which is considered to be of national importance for the Australian economy and society. The CME sector also plays significant economic and social roles in the lives of over one billion members worldwide. Following the principles of action design research, the paper describes a method of gradual development of VA skills using visual stories as boundary objects.