From banking and energy to travel, manufacturing, and retail, data is important for any business leader regardless of the industry you work in. With data informing more and more business decisions, one of the most important factors to any company is how they represent that data. Whether it’s to your customers, employees, or your stakeholders, data representation, and by extension, data visualization, has a crucial role to play.
So, what exactly is data visualization? Put in its simplest terms, data visualization involves the representation of a data set through visual means. Since many humans are visual learners, having a data visualization tool can often be the best way to offer insights about a complex data set. Here are just a few of the reasons that data visualization is important in business intelligence.
Data visualization makes raw data more digestible.
For enterprises that rely on big data, having a dashboard that offers graphs, visuals, and other analytics can often be much more useful than simply looking at endless rows and columns in a spreadsheet. Even though business users can get a lot out of tools like Microsoft Excel, in order to really come up with actionable insights that are easily communicated, having a visual tool can be worth its weight in gold.
Especially as you’re looking to compare different segments of raw data, pivot tables often aren’t enough. To make your data more digestible, having bar charts, pie charts, and other types of charts can be incredibly helpful. Especially with an analytics platform that gives you real-time, interactive visuals, finding outliers and correlations has never been more straightforward.
Data visualization lets you make informed decisions.
What’s one of the most obvious benefits of having more digestible information? You and your employees can make more informed decisions about a broad array of aspects that are important to your business. For example, using a dashboard of analytics might give you a better sense of how different social media posts are performing in your latest advertising campaign. This can help you continue to promote similar content in future marketing efforts. Or, you might see that a few of the members of your sales or customer service teams have really put in some extra effort over the past few months. This can help you determine who to promote or offer a raise during performance reviews.
Good business intelligence is dependent on good business data visualization, so it’s important to have the right tools and dashboards in order to facilitate your data analysis. TIBCO is a leading company in this sort of work, offering tools that help unify disparate data sources and platforms in order to get you the real-time data you need to start making better decisions immediately.
Data visualization helps you know where you’re headed.
Especially when you’re looking at large amounts of data, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. However, large data sets ultimately can give you powerful insights on where your business is headed. You don’t even need to be a business analyst to get these takeaways, as long as you’re able to use different types of charts to visualize different trends and metrics.
For example, most third graders can tell you that if a line chart is illustrating an upward trend, the future is bright. Conversely, if a downward slope is identified in a line graph or even bar charts, you can anticipate that things aren’t looking so great. Especially if the graph is giving you visual context surrounding income data or performance data, this can help you better understand what future months or years might look like. Identifying and predicting these downward trends early can help you course-correct, ultimately saving your enterprise.