Storytelling is an art that is simple and complex at the same time. Stories provoke thought and bring out insights and it is similar for large and complex data sets as well. Companies collect a lot of information through various data sources and store it in a single file. Through years this data keeps on increasing and by the time an organization realizes; the data becomes unmanageable. What organizations fail to understand here is that the best stories not presented well, end up being useless. Therefore, it is very important to start dealing with complex data sets using analytics and visualization; the art of storytelling.
Challenges in managing complex data:
- Data is big
- Data is unstructured
- Data is dirty or of bad quality
- Data is incomplete, inaccurate and contains duplicates
Usually, because of such complexities in data, most of the companies are unsure whether they are travelling the right direction or not. Appropriate data cleansing activity could help here, but companies can’t afford to do it on their own and hence get benefitted by delegating it to outsourcing firms.
Operating the data using analytics
The complexity of data indicates the level of difficulty a company faces while trying to translate that data into business value. Analysis of that data includes data cleansing, rearrangement, categorization, and visualization; which predominantly simplify complex data sets.
- Schindler leveraged intelligent analytics to perform predictive maintenance of elevators. Thus, the company justified every dollar clients spend on service and replacement.
- General motors with cost-saving predictions covered about a quarter of its 30k factory robots and managed to foresee and avoid about 100 potential failures in 2 years.
Companies willing to improve the decision-making process for increased profitability achieved through improved productivity, need to brush up their data with help of data cleansing experts. It ultimately helps them to get on to descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics for better insights from complex data sets.
Post analytics it’s time for data visualization
For performing data visualization analytics is not a prerequisite. It is still a conundrum whether analytics is a must for visualization or not. But one thing is for sure that analytics has always turned out to be beneficial to companies.
Visualization started from the time of excel, quick, handy tools which were gradually creating a graphical content helping you to extract important business trends. Since then, visualizations in form of charts, videos, infographics and images have become an inseparable part of reporting technology which is just getting unconventional and advanced.
Benefits of data visualization
- Absorb information quickly: Data visualization simplifies makes complex data into simpler ones. This further simplifies the gleaning of insights and information from large datasets.
- Find the outliers: Outliners skew your results and hence it is necessary to eliminate these outliners before they predict something which is incorrect and harmful to your business. As outliners tend to pull down the data averages and portray something unusual, visualization helps in finding and eradicating them.
- Hold your audience’s interests longer: Appealing graphical images have the quality to attract readers as nowadays grappling reader’s attention is getting complicated.
- Understand your next steps: Visualization helps in identifying trends and patterns to easily understand the next best move with less time and energy.
- User-friendly data visuals: The best data visuals are the one which are easy to understand, real time and quickly upgradeable with new technologies.
Conclude
Companies are getting perplexed with how to manage huge unstructured dirty datasets. Wise use of cleansing techniques, analytics and visualization processes prove to be a savior. Data analytics has shifted its way to a whole new level just by enabling a better service of converting your complex data into interesting visuals. Visualization, the art of storytelling is not only about charts, images or graphs; but is actually revealing some anonymous insights, patterns, trends, and consequently making your organization – wiser.