In the Fall 2019 issue of ThinkTWENTY20, I wrote about assurance issues related to digital media – moving beyond numbers and words in reporting and audit workpaper/audit evidence issues related to images and video.

 Financial professionals often leverage charts and graphs and other visualizations as ways to present results, to help highlights trends and relations between data points. Visuals can provide “the big picture” rather than being in the weeds. So using graphics and visualizations for telling a story, or marketing, or getting and keeping people together through steps, facilitating understanding and using additional senses to help in remembering information is common.

But I want to talk about graphical tools for information gathering rather than telling, for managing and analyzing, jumpstarting thinking, and helping with beginning to end processes.

My introduction to “graphics” in the audit function was the green plastic IBM process flowcharting template. It was provided to me at my initial Arthur Andersen audit training at the St. Charles campus on the Fox River. (I guess the facility is now known as the “Q”.) This was before the IBM PCs and flowchart software.

As I noted on my LinkedIn, using the PC for modelling and simulation is how I first became aware of my passion for the PC many years back. It was the earliest days of the PC and Lotus 1-2-3 (yes, that long ago), and I was asked to use this new tool to help develop a model for a local dairy being acquired by a larger organization. I was asked to simulate delivery routes to help in projecting revenues for the merged organization. I was the “human” simulator, as optimization was not built in; counter-intuitively, I was able to prove that fewer routes turned into more income, getting a substantially bigger offer for the seller. The hours on that project flew by, and I knew I wanted more. But graphics were not yet a big part of that story. And graphics were not yet an input to the process, rather than the output.

Enter a spreadsheet called Javelin. Javelin did turn things upside down. It had unusual features for financial modeling. One was about creating (or rather being able to update) the numbers from the charts, rather than the charts from the numbers. You create a bar chart. You decide one of the bars should be longer or shorter. You click, drag to size, and the underlying numbers update to match. Microsoft added this functionality to Excel, moved it to an ad-on for Excel 2007, and I’m not sure what the current status is.

I hope, over the next few blog entries, to speak about gaining control and getting graphical. I’m catching up on the status of some old friends that brought the green template into the personal computer age – flow charting and process charting tools, which seem to have lost some ground as Microsoft built capabilities into Office products. I want to talk about Mind Mapping, Topic Maps/Knowledge Graphs, and other planning, brain storming, simulation and analytical tools.

And we’ll discuss different ways of getting started (e.g., text, tables, outlines or templates/digital stencil, drag and drop, connections (or both)), and how to leverage information once entered.

Your constructive thoughts to guide the dialogue warmly welcomed.