Do your Apps win Michelin Stars? Do they need to?

Back in 2012, at the TED@SXSWi event in Austin, Texas, JP Rangaswami, then Chief Scientist at SalesForce, now Chief Data Officer at Deutsche Bank, challenged us to consider that information is food.  It is an interesting analogy. I especially liked the "Supersize Me" suggestion of having to watch Fox News for 30 days.

So, if information was food - what would you do differently?

If information was food, what kind of data visualization would you like to see?

Would you be happy with the daily stodge? Not too pretty to look at, and you are not 100% sure of where the ingredients come from (and you have only been ill a few times!). Perhaps of the variety sold to the residents of Ankh-Morpork by CMOT Dibbler?

Or would you be looking for the time-consuming, detail-attentive, incredibly beautiful and incredibly expensive, Michelin starred fare?

Or is it somewhere inbetween?

The reality is, boringly, that it doesn't matter how pretty nor how ugly the presentation layer is if the ingredients are suspect. As I said in a post last year, good governance prevents people from getting food poisoning.

The first step is to get the ingredients right (or as right as we possibly can!) - then we can focus on the presentation. And focus we must. A plate of great ingredients just mashed together will not encourage our diners to return. We mush present our ingredients as best we can with the tools that we have available and then the foodies will keep coming back.

You never know, one day there may be a Michelin judge with them.

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Stephen Redmond is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
He is CTO of CapricornVentis a Qlik Elite Partner.