Data and Data Visualization, Why Is It Important and How Is It Affecting Us?
Data is a hot topic. People keep saying data is the new gold, the new oil or even the new bacon — isn’t it the new everything? Data is hot because of the amount of data that is now available and the things you can do with it.
It has gone from scarce and expensive to abundant and cheap, making it more difficult to process and understand. So vast that it has become a challenge to store, understand and analyze. That is when the concept of ‘Big Data’ emerged. These data, once correctly processed, can transform into something valuable that people are still trying to define.
“Raw data alone is of little value, it cannot be useful unless we try to make sense of it.”
HOW SERIOUS COULD IT BE WHEN ONE GROUP OF HUMAN CAN GAIN BENEFITS FROM DATA MORE THAN THE OTHERS?
Before we go any further, I want to talk to you a bit why data is important. My words alone might sound trivial, but have you perhaps heard of one of the well-known author name Yuval Noah Harari (his books are all worth reading). He expressed that “[i]n the 21th century, data will become the most important asset beyond both land and machinery. If data flows into too few hands, humankind will split into different species.” What is your opinion about this? Scary maybe? is it just an overstatement or does it actually sound possible? For me, after reading this book, I think this is not only possible but unavoidable. However, my feeling is also mixed with the excitement of how our life can change for the better if we ride along on this wave of using data as a tool to push ourselves forward.
HOW SHOULD I START, WHAT CAN I DO WITH DATA?
Big data is often combined with machine learning to create predictive analytics or other data analytics processes to bring the value of information into light. There are many steps that need to be done until data becomes useful. ‘Data Mining’, ‘Machine Learning’, ‘Data Analytics’, ‘Data Engineer’ are the terms we often hear when stepping into the world of data. Along with those is the word ‘Data Visualization’.
I bet 1 out of 10 who works in ‘Tech or Business World’ must have already heard of the word ‘Data Visualization’. It is something simple yet effective for everyone to use, especially for those who don’t possess any coding skill (yet). I believe that no matter what level you are on, even the experts who work with data, still need to visualize data in order to effectively communicate whatever they have discovered.
‘Data Visualization’ that is once considered to be one of a nice-to-have skill is now a must-have skill among many other skills.
WHAT REALLY IS ‘DATA VISUALIZATION’?
Basically, Data Visualization represents data and information in the form of graphic to help understand its meaning. Data Visualization is the process of taking raw data and transforming it into graphs, charts, images that explain the numbers, allowing us to gain insights. It changes the way we make sense of the information to create value out of it, discover new patterns and spot trend.
“90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual”.
From my personal experience, there are two major types of purpose that lead to Data Visualization. It was either built because you or your users (aka bunch of people whom you work with) want to tell the stories they already have at hand or used as a tool to help solve problems/ making decisions. Put simply, it’s either declaring something or exploring something.
DATA VIZ CAN GIVE US A SENSE OF DATA WAY FASTER THAN READING TEXT
Take a look at something many of you are probably familiar with, like this Google map picture below
In a glance of a second, seeing these red, yellow, green lines on the map, your brain can tell what the overall traffic is like, instead of having to read the traffic information to figure out which ways they should take or avoid if they want to get to the destination as fast as possible. Let’s check out another example.
From the picture above, which continent is affected more by COVID-19 between North America and Africa? I bet you can guess by the shade of blue that ‘North America’ is the answer even though you haven't spotted any number yet.
Visualizing data benefits us human to consume the information and understand it in a much higher speed. It is just how our brain works.
MAKE SMARTER DECISIONS WITH DATA
When we look at the companies dominating the business landscape today — tech giants like Amazon and Google or industry-specific heroes like Netflix in entertainment — there’s one common thread: they are all seriously data-driven companies…
These companies are using analytics and visualization to better understand their own businesses, customers, industry trends — and it’s giving them a serious market advantage.
Here at my organization, we start encouraging people of every department to start making business decisions based on data, to discover trends and launch new products using advanced analytics and big data.
At the moment there are many tools out there from an open source e.g. Datastudio by Google , Datawrapper, Rawgraphs,to commercial software such as Qlik Sense, Tableau, Power BI etc. that could help you visualizing and analyzing data more easily. Currently, lots of organizations, both public and private, have provided their datasets online, ready for everyone to explore such as Kaggle, Worldbank.org , Google Dataset — even in Thailand we have our own website data.go.th that is accessible for everyone. It is just a matter of your decision when to start learning because right now the Internet has almost everything to offer you.
NOT ONLY IN BUSINESS, BUT HERE AT KBTG, DATA VISUALIZATION IS ALSO APPLIED IN THE ASPECT OF ITS CHALLENGES
For instance, last year our top executives decided that it is extremely important for our organization to be able to evaluate the overall status related to IT security risks. Assigned to the project, my team used Qlik Sense as a data visualization tool to help create a dashboard for monitoring threats by analyzing all the internal activities concerning cyber security.
This is just an example along with million things we do for our customer (You see, your data rests in a good hand)
I’m here just to raise awareness of this simple yet powerful tool but if you are interested and want to know more of this ‘Data Visualization’ topic or how to make a good one,
I have a good book that I was once introduced to called ‘Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals’. I find this book to be quite practical and very helpful for hands-on practice as it teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data.
Or even easier, type ‘Data Visualization’ on Google to find all the information you want (When I first checked in early October, there were 136 million results. Now that I check the result again around mid-October, it shows 279 million results!).
Before we part… I want to add that our world is rapidly changing. This ongoing pandemic is the living proof of how fast thing can change. We cannot put all fate in gut feeling and only rely on it for an important decision like previous generations had done anymore. You, and everyone else, need to adapt to survive and start using data is key.
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