When your company invests in digital transformation projects, it’s easy to believe that if you capture the most data possible, business insights will automatically present themselves.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
Modern AI technology has the capability to capture vast amounts of information about your business and its consumers. This information gets translated to raw data points with powerful analytical potential.
What the most successful enterprises understand is that it’s not how much data you have, it’s how you can leverage that data.
Data visualization lets you graphically represent patterns in information and draw out critical insights. By graphically mapping and contextualizing the data you gather, the human mind can better recognize trends and form timely impressions and forward-thinking insights.
Take for example Spotify Wrapped. The popular music streaming company has used its annual Wrapped feature to provide users with a graphic representation of their listening habits. It uses algorithmic data to show you statistics about your most listened-to genres, artists, and songs, total minutes spent listening to Spotify, and more in a snappy visual presentation.
The proof of data visualization is in the numbers: Over 90 million people engaged with Spotify Wrapped in 2020.
Data doesn’t speak for itself. It’s up to you to interpret the story it’s telling you. Data is all around, and with the right data visualization tools, it can be interesting and engaging.
1. How Data Visualization Works
2. Examples of Data Visualization
3. Digital Transformation Is Data Transformation
Data visualization moves beyond raw numbers or simple graphs and charts, in order to better engage the human mind and drive more creative and precise insights about the information that’s being presented.
Visualization helps data engage us in ways that are intuitive and meaningful. It gives company stakeholders a fast and effective way to interpret data for insights such as:
· Connecting and correlating data points
· Taking the best approach to optimizing business decisions
· Understanding trends in past data
· Mitigating potential pitfalls and risks
· Building insights into consumer behavior and expectations
· Reacting to market changes with increased agility and precision
Better business outcomes can be achieved with a variety of techniques using visual cues to help us better understand the relationships between data points. The following are a few examples of data visualization businesses can use to get more out of their digital transformation strategy.
Your organization can use heatmap visualization to color code numerical data points, for instance by representing lower data points as “cool” colors and higher data points as “hot” colors. A common example of this is when heatmaps are used to represent data about user interaction with web pages, such as what areas of a page get the most user focus, eye tracking, and mouse tracking.
Histograms are bar charts used to show the frequency distribution of numeric data sets by how often they fall into certain ranges. This is broken down into intervals, or “bins.” Spikes in a histogram may indicate either a problematic variable that needs to be addressed or trends that could be leveraged to benefit a business.
A fever chart represents how data for a single variable changes over time. This type of data visualization is particularly effective in interpreting long-term business statistics and determining cyclical patterns and behaviors that may emerge from raw data. For example, a fever chart may be used to represent the rise and fall of a stock price over time.
Essentially, area charts combine the visual elements of line and bar graphs to represent how numeric values change over time while also depicting volume. Area charts use shading between line graphs so an audience can visualize overall trends in data, while also seeing relationships between series over time. A business might use area charts to analyze broad trends in data, for instance comparing sales volumes for several key product types.
There are many more types of data visualization techniques your organization can use, and which work best will depend on your digital transformation and overall business goals.
Data is everywhere, and there’s more and more of it every day.
With the growing use of AI and machine learning technology to collect and identify relationships between individual points of data, businesses need tools to communicate about data quickly and intuitively, to find trends and outliers, risks and potential for growth.
Many businesses invest in digital transformation projects that produce a mountain of data, only to find that it doesn’t produce the expected outcomes. This happens when data isn’t leveraged to its full potential.
Tools like data visualization help interpret data in new ways. Yet to truly get the most out of your data it’s important to consult with experienced technology leaders. The right IT consultant can work with your business leaders to align your technology and business goals and use data to drive optimization and growth.
Managed IT specialists are technology leaders who can help organizations use their digital assets proactively and better achieve business goals.
Here at Vudu, we understand that digital transformation is about seeing data through the right lens. The outdated model of break/fix IT services won’t serve the needs of a data-driven, ever-evolving digital marketplace, nor will help your business leverage data in a way that’s sustainable or profitable.
Vudu’s managed IT specialists offer an alternative as business-minded technology wizards with a unique ability to convert data into insights, insights into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. With that wisdom, our clients can make better decisions for their businesses and bring about supernatural transformation.
At Vudu, we are technology wizards who want to bring IT magic to your business and achieve supernatural results. Want to learn more about how the right data insights can transform your business? Tell us more about your goals.
