In the near future you will use voice commands to ask for actionable stories to be related to you from raw data. It sounds like Star Trek but it’s months away, not years.

Today is the start of IBM’s SmarterCommerce Global Summit 2013. As part of the program IBM invited several industry influencers to attend the event. Last night, I spent some time chatting with Sandra Zoratti, author of Precision Marketing, Stratigent‘s Bill Bruno and Triberr‘s Dino Dogan.

I shared with them how I was first exposed to real data driven marketing online in the early 1990s. I was managing banner ad placement ads on sites like Yahoo!, Excite and AltaVista for a consumer focused software company.  We could measure by each ad creative and placement how much usage and revenue they generated from their software download. From the start we developed hooks into the software to marry up the acquisition data. We could then ask the analysts to run queries for us and send us Excel spreadsheets. We used them to decide where to keep investing in banner ads.

So, of course, when Jeffrey and I started focusing more of our time on online businesses we expected people to do similar things.  Where we ever surprised!

Excel became the de-facto tool for analysts. Do you remember the days of running web logs files in excel to analyze them? This was before tools like WebTrends log analyzer became popular and of course well before any of the javascript based web analytics tools even launched. Excel is still a great tool for analysts as Chief Evangelist for Bing Ads, John Gagnon has shown in his last couple of columns. It is not however, the best tool to share data  and collaborate with the entire organization. How many times have you seen Excel spreadsheets and charts go straight from the inbox to some digital black hole, never to be used again?

This past week, we saw data visualization platform Tableau, enjoy a  successful IPO. I love what you can do with their platform, but  it still doesn’t pack the punch it needs to in order to get an organization to act on the data. As Robbie Allen, the CEO of Automated Insights points out ”most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results.”

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