The Importance of Data Visualization in Business Intelligence

Data visualization is the process of interpreting data and presenting it in a pictorial or graphical format. Currently, we are living in the era of an extremely large data set where data has been described as a raw material for business. The volume of data used in businesses, industries, research organizations and technological development is enormous and it is rapidly growing every day. The more data we collect and analyze, the more capable we can be in making critical business decisions. However, with the massive growth of data, it has become harder for businesses to extract crucial information from the available data. That is where the importance of data visualization becomes clear. Data visualization helps people understand the significance of data by summarizing and presenting a huge amount of data in a simple and easy-to-understand format in order to communicate the information clearly and effectively.

Why Is Data Visualization Important?

A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. Humans just understand data better through pictures rather than reading numbers in rows and columns. Accordingly, if the data is presented in a graphical format, people are more able to effectively find correlations and raise important questions.

Data visualization helps the business to achieve numerous goals such as:

• Converting the business data into interactive graphs for dynamic interpretation to serve the business goals
• Transforming data into visually appealing, interactive dashboards of various data sources to serve the business with insights
• Creating more attractive and informative dashboards of various graphical data representations
• Making appropriate decisions by drilling into the data and finding the insights
• Figuring out the patterns, trends, and correlations in the data being analyzed to determine where they must improve their operational processes and thereby grow their business
• Giving a fuller picture of the data under analysis
• Organizing and presenting massive data intuitively to present important findings from the data
• Making better, quick, and informed decisions with data visualization

Why Do Modern Businesses Need Data Visualization?

With the huge volume of data collected about business activities using different means, business leaders need proper techniques to easily drill down into the data to see where they can improve operational processes and grow their businesses. Data visualization brings business intelligence to reality. Data visualization is needed by modern businesses for these reasons:

• Data visualization helps companies to analyze its different processes so the management can focus on specific areas for improvement to generate more revenue and improve productivity.
• It brings business intelligence to life.
• It applies a creative approach to understanding the hidden information within the business data.
• It provides a better and faster way to identify patterns, trends, and correlation in the data sets that would remain undetected with just text.
• It identifies new business opportunities by predicting upcoming trends or sales volumes and the revenue they will generate.
• It supplies managers with information they need to make more effective comparisons between data sets by plotting them on the same visualization.
• It enables managers to understand the correlations between the operating conditions and the business performance.
• It helps businesses to discover the gray areas of the business and make the right decisions for improvement.
• Data visualization helps managers to understand customers’ behaviors and interests and hence retains customers and market share.

How Data Visualization Is Used for Business Decision-Making

Data visualization is a real asset for any business to help make real-­ time business decisions. It visualizes extracted information into logical and meaningful parts and helps users avoid information overload by keeping things simple, relevant, and clear. There are many ways in which visualizations help a business to improve its decision-making.

Faster Responses

Quick response to customers’ or users’ requirements is important for any company to retain their clients, as well as to keep their loyalty. With the massive amount of data collected daily via social networks or via companies’ systems, it becomes incredibly useful to put useful interpretations of the

collected data into the hands of managers and decision-makers so they can quickly identify issues and improve response times.

Simplicity

It is impossible to make efficient decisions based on large amounts of raw data. Therefore, data visualization gives the full picture of the scoped parameters and simplifies the data by enabling decision-makers to ­cherry-­pick the relevant data they need and dive into a detailed view wherever is needed.

Easier Pattern Visualization

Data visualization provides easier approaches to identifying upcoming trends and patterns within data sets and hence enables businesses to make efficient decisions and prepare strategies in advance.

Team Involvement

Data visualizations process not only historical data but also real-time data. Different organization units gain the benefit of having direct access to the extracted information displayed by data visualization tools. This increases the levels of collaboration between departments to help them achieve strategic goals.

Unify Interpretation

Data visualizations can produce charts and graphics that lead to the same interpretations by all who use the extracted information for decision-­ making. There are many data visualization tools such as R, Python, Julia, Matlab etc.

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