While the interests in analytics and its benefits are increasing by the day, some businesses are challenged by the complexity and confusion that analytics can generate. Companies can get stuck trying to analyze all that’s possible and all that they could do through analytics, when they should be taking that next step of recognizing what’s important and what they should be doing — for their customers, stakeholders, and employees.
Discovering real business opportunities and achieving desired outcomes can be elusive. To overcome this, companies should pursue a simpler path to uncovering the insight in their data and making insight-driven decisions that add value.
DATA VISUALIZATIONhas an amazing ability to make the complex simple, and the latest tools can do much more than give everyone the same view of data. It’s only through visualization that we can take something as abstract as symbols and turn it into a physical image that has dimensions that our eyes can quickly see, and our brains understand.
We can grasp data’s meaning more quickly. Visualization tells us when trends are heading in the wrong direction and we need to intervene. But even more, when we visualize the scope and scale of today’s enormous data sets, we pick up things with the naked eye that would otherwise be hidden. We can see data’s previously untold story.
We can see where Pennsylvania’s Vote ID Law is disproportionately affecting minorities and students. Visualization of Twitter data can show us a revolution as it unfolds in Cairo. What was being reported in the media as mass crowds forming in Tahrir Square comes to life when the network data becomes visualized as it grows.
Beyond just data about supply chain or production statistics, we’re more often visualizing data that has many dimensions, like location data overlaid with precipitation or air pollution. Adding to the mix, time series visualizations show progression of different dimensions over time, unlocking enormous insights into how things happened, like erosion, flooding or retreating of glacial ice, not just what happened at a moment in time (that’s BI…). It’s Geovisualization and it brings an entirely new perspective to understanding Big Data.
The power of being able to see data for what it really tells us is the point of visualization. The methods of display can’t be complicated, or the point of visualizing data is lost. Visualization serves us because it puts the tools of understanding business directly in the hands of those needing to make decisions. And ultimately, making decisions is what Big Data is all about.
