Abstract

Soban et al. (2013) present a trade study of a strategic airlift decision-making environment that has been developed around the US Air Force Lockheed C-5A and C-5M aircraft. They pose that it is not enough to rely solely on information sharing to induce effective decision-making, but that business analytics (BA) has an emerging role in improving decision-making. With the use of BA methods and tools, analysts engage in tasks such as forecasting and pattern recognition in order to form judgments about a situation, thus contributing to better-informed decision-making. Soban et al. (2013) focus on visual analytics, which represents a method within the broader field of BA, aimed at visualizing complex data relations to support interactive reasoning (Wong and Thomas 2004). The field of visual analytics has been considered as a key enabler for decision-making under data-intensive situations, because it promises increased contextualization and understanding of data presented.