Visualizations - A Powerful Story Teller

What is Visualization of Data?

Before deep diving into the subject, we need to understand the terminology - Visualization. Visualization means representation of data or datapoints in a Visual form.

The visual effect gives a great sense of understanding to the leadership and for the users. The advantage of visualization is comparison of data points across periods, analysis of large amount of data chunks and quicker interpretation of data movements.

This gives a pointer to the leadership or management to appropriately drive actions for improvements.

microsoft excel

Some history:

In the 90's many of the companies used Excel dashboards to represent data to show it to Customers, Shareholders, management team and others. We used to call it as Excel dashboards or charts.

Some of the companies used Excel automations or Power point automations to draw charts and dashboards through monthly feed of data through data templates. As part of the Data Visualizations, we are moving towards the next steps to represent large and complex data points for better management analysis and decision making.

This has made the decisions timely and in an efficient manner.

  • Relevant articles for your further reading below;

Where do we use Data visualization Techniques?

  • Difficult to interpret data points

  • Not able to draw meaningful conclusions

  • Large amount of data sets or data chunks

  • Want to communicate a story to Customers and Leadership

  • Data cohesiveness is absent. Key data points are not preserved

  • Data discipline is missing. Huge delay in decision making process.

  • Operations are not changing. There are lots of customer complaints

  • Traditional data analysis methods such as excel charts, pivots not useful

Data analysis

How do I prepare for Data Visualizations next steps?

  • Understand the business needs. Find out, whether there is a business sponsorship for such a move.

  • Understand the data needs. Find out what is going to be analyzed, frequency, period, past data etc.,

  • Define the business case and business value it is going to generate for Business. Return on investment is the key.

  • Understand whether your ERP or legacy systems support the data retrieval capabilities as per required frequency

  • Find out whether, you have necessary skilled resources to carry out the task. Are they trained enough to carry out tasks

  • Check out for the IT infrastructure, software and storage costs. Is it a sustainable operating model for the next 5 years atleast?

Data charts, Data analytics
Power Bi, Dashboards

Typical Power BI Dashboards

Visualization, Data quality

Tableau, Zoho, Google, Adobe provides solutions

Takeaways:

  • Quality of data visualization is based on quality of data points

  • Do not use Data visualization techniques as a temporary fix.

  • Data drives decisions - Use the visualization to drive right decisions

  • Do not drive change very often. Launch, get feedbacks and improve

  • Verify the accuracy every month or other frequencies for correctness

  • Corroborate the results with other data sources - Deliver consistently

  • Visualization can weave a powerful story - It drives big process changes

  • Data Visualization need to create business value for customers and self

Data driven, IT, Tech, Technologies