Data is only as useful as the insights you can derive from it. You can gather years of granular data and create a vast depth of potential knowledge and key indicators but gain nothing if you cannot read the meaning behind this mass of data points. Data visualization is essential to modern business intelligence strategy and decision-making.
Data and information visualization is designing and creating easy-to-understand, easy-to-communicate graphics or visual representations from large and complex data sets. Whether your data is qualitative or quantitative, it must be visualized before you can put it to use. Charts, graphs, infographics, simulated examples, and summarized statistics are all part of visualizing your data and information so they can provide the business intelligence insights you need to identify both problems and opportunities for improvement.
Why Data Visualization is a Best Practice
Data visualization is a must-have for any business operation and/or a full business intelligence implementation. In fact, it has been part of business best practices long before computers existed to do the visualizing for us. Bar charts, line charts, and pie charts have been used for decades (in some cases, centuries) to help business leaders understand the trends occurring in their company, industry, and customer base.
Data visualization turns a sheet of numbers or information sources into something you can understand. It’s built into the way we talk about business. You want to see revenue “go up” and expenses “go down” because this is how we visualize data in its most basic form. However, with modern data analysis and visualization tools, we can gain even deeper insights from more sophisticated views and the ability to visualize truly vast depths of business information.
Making Better Decisions with Data Visualization
How does data visualization help us make better decisions? First, it allows us to see what is happening within the company and surrounding factors. Place the survey results in a pie chart, and you can more easily see the percentage of people who answer in specific categories. Compare monthly or yearly data in a bar chart to see whether you are doing better over time. Use colors to represent multiple data layers to see how trends influence one another or respond to the same factors over time.
When you can visualize the meaning of data and how it relates to other key indicators, you can make decisions based on those complex relations. For example, let’s say you visually chart customer engagement & completed purchases alongside a timeline of various sales campaigns. You can then identify which campaigns had an increase or decrease in sales over time and make decisions to improve sales campaigns in the future.Â
You might create a visualization comparing the performance metrics of different vendors to help you choose the most reliable business partners or chart customer shopping trends to help your business maximize each period.
The Consequences of Poor Data Representation
Conversely, the benefits of poor data visualization can have negative consequences. What happens when you don’t have access to the data you need or it takes too long to analyze and interpret the data you have? A company that lacks clear data visualization will be subject to glacially slow decision-making or be forced to make decisions without the benefit of insights rooted in relevant data.
Without enough data, even good visualization can result in poor insights and incomplete information when making decisions. But without information visualization technology, even vast quantities of data will require long hours pouring over numerical values, which may not provide the quality of understanding from a few good charts.
Improve Your Business Intelligence Solutions
The best way to achieve high-quality data analysis and information visualization is through AI in business. Handling massive data sets and sifting for relevant patterns is one of the things that AI does best, better than any human or team. From there, generating colorful and useful data visualization graphs is a breeze. Your business intelligence relies on parsing data into useful information, and AI has that capability in spades.
5P Consulting can help you transform your business data into the insights you need to optimize decision-making at every layer of your business operations. From streamlining your workflow to engaging your audience, data analysis through visualization strategies has always been essential. The more data you collect through business intelligence, the more important well-presented visual analysis becomes.
If you’re ready to improve your business intelligence solutions, contact 5P Consulting for a free consultation. Our business intelligence solutions are ready to empower your company to its greatest potential through AI-enhanced data analysis and expert decision-making strategies.