We are living in an era of Big Data and whether most people or organizations realize this, is immaterial. Data sources and types are being released every day. Yes, data storage and retrieval are important, but organisations ultimately should seek to use this information to make better business decisions.
Data visualization is often just the starting point. We use visualizations techniques because they help us solve problems faster or better, or they let us learn something new, and these activities usually have monetary value. As such, compared to even five years ago, today, there is a greater need to visualize data, which has now become multi-dimensional and multi-relational.
Why visual organisation ?
Visual things are easily understood, remembered and compared than other forms by other human senses. For decision makers at the helm of affairs of an enterprise, they need to understand the whole business story quickly and take necessary actions and decisions before any competitor does.
At the outset, it is important to understand what data visualization consists of. Visual Charts like Line graphs, Scatter plots, Area charts, Histograms, Horizontal bars, Stacked bars, Pie charts and more advanced visuals with unique dimensions and colors like Tree maps, Heat Maps, Symbol maps, Filled Maps, Circle views, Box and Whisker plot (popularly known as Box Plot), Gantt charts, Bullets graphs, Packed bubbles and many more make up data visualization.
Visual organizations recognise that data visualizations may include bad, suspect, duplicate, or incomplete data, but that does not stop them from proceeding. In fact, data visualization can help users identify fishy information and purify data faster than manual hunting and pecking. Some of the key reasons for any organization, aspiring to become a Visual Organisation, could be based on benefits like:
1. It helps to better understand what has happened and why.
2. It helps to understand what is currently happening and why.
3. It helps to understand what is about to happen and why.
4. It helps to discover new insights from existing datasets and sources.
5. It helps to make better business decisions.
6. It helps to diagnose and address impending issues.
7. It helps to ask better questions of business data.
Why more relevant to MSMEs
In general, decision-makers in MSMEs spend a lot of their time looking at the dashboard sometimes literally, but only have a blurry and fragmented view of their surroundings – the markets they operate in, the economies they belong to and the demographics they target. By establishing a data-friendly architecture and fostering a data-oriented mindset, MSMEs stand a far better chance of reaching higher levels of Data Visualisation than larger organizations with a great deal of technological and cultural baggage.
MSMEs can expect to realize greater benefits as they embrace interactive data visualization, as a process of gaining knowledge and insights from data and its visual interfaces. The main goal of data visualization is its ability to visualize data, communicating information clearly and effectively. Visual Organizations realize that today, you can pretty much visualize anything.
Best practices
1. Think of Your Data Analysis as a Story -Use a Story Structure
2. Authentic source of data – your Story will flow seamless
3. Think of yourself as a film editor- when it comes to Visuals
4. Make it easy for Audience to understand
5. It incites and invites direct discussions
Stages of data visualisation
1. Collection and Storage of data
2. Data Processing
3. Mapping the data to a Visual Representation
4. Cognitive understanding and association with output
Opportunities for MSMEs to become visual compliant
Many powerful Data Visualization/Business Intelligence/Data Mining tools are available in the market. Topping the popularity charts with MSMEs are Tableau, SAS Visual Analytics, MicroStrategy, QlikView, D3.js, among others. Either of them can, in a jiffy, slice and dice data and bring out new business insights, develop storyboards, create unique dashboards, generate relevant graphs and diagrams besides popping statistical charts.
Even, with every new release of Microsoft Office suite, advanced features are added to Microsoft Excel (latest being, 2016 version), which is now built upon robust analytical platform, to generate myriad number of graphs ,charts, diagrams and statistical analysis, in no time. Besides this, Microsoft products also allow the integration of Add-Ins applications, from third party (like XL Miner, Analysis Tool Pack), which tightly integrate with Microsoft Office to brings to surface, a power-packed and authentic Business Analytics and Visualizations.
Tableau, one of the popular visualization tools known to MSMEs, easily works with smaller size datasets (enterprise transactions data). The small size datasets have inherent advantage of doing clutter-free analytical analysis and visualization generation in quick time. When dealing with Small Data, it is often not difficult to see what is going on. Traditional business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools that handled relatively small amounts of structured data, can with ease possibly throw light on many unknown and unexplained aspects of business environment. No longer do MSMEs have to spend years and invest millions of dollars before they become expert in this art.
A visualization can be viewed from two important perspectives: the perspective of the developer and the perspective of the user. Becoming a true Visual Organization, though, requires much more than just buying some software and deploying it. Despite the Data Deluge and Techniques (or perhaps because of it), data often confuses us. It is indeed a journey, not a “project.”
Source: The Economic Times
