Survey on Spotfire Visualization
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Spotfire for data visualizations including but not limit to business metrics report as well as patient profile and safety data review in clinical studies. It adresses the user requirement that have interactive visualizations and support drill down analysis with the study data, allow users to have in-depth understanding about the contributed data points behind the visulizations and tables, etc. Some kind of standard reports and visualization / tables have been developed that could be reused for different purpose.
Pros
- Support diversified visualizations and tables with multiple filters panels
- Built-in drill down analysis and tooltips support with additional information presented as needed
- Support expanded data analysis with external programming language like R, SAS when necessary
- Support multiple data sources and file formats
Cons
- The interface could be further beutified and optimized, adapt to the modern front-end UI design
- The performance enhancement when proceed huge datasets in published web player working mode
- Simplify the call function of external language R, SAS, even with API, etc.
Likelihood to Recommend
Generally, I would highly recommend Spotfire for those scenarios that have the requirements with interactive visualizations and drill down analysis to conduct data review and insights analysis. In addition, If user need to have a quick solution without much programming efforts for visualizations, Spotfire is the right option. In addition, Spotfire visualizations is more suited for those data with relatively stable structures and the data size is not too huge.
In another word, I would not recommend to use Spotfire for those scenarias, including regulatory submissions activities that have strict GxP compliance requirement, have very flexible and frequently changed data structures, as well as when the underlying data is very huge. Other than that, if complicated model analysis expected, Spotfire might not be the best choice.
