Data Visualization is Not Just a Buzz Word. Why Is It So Important?

Do you ever get a little tired of office jargon?

Maybe you have begun to think in paragraphs like this: To enable your Blue Sky Thinking, and to futureproof moving forward, you need to be constantly reaching out to the right stakeholders. As a business you aim to synergize in the right ways to leverage your mental real estate and create an uplift in your target verticals. Obviously. You do it by valuing your employee skillsets, making sure you touch base offline regularly with customers and clients, grab the low hanging fruit, be a product evangelist, and pretty much always take the holistic, 360 degrees, helicopter view on things. Your fears are dominated by not having enough bandwidth, a jam in the pipeline, the strategic staircase crumbling, a paradigm shift you don’t expect, and ultimately being unable to square the circle.

And breath.

The corporate world in general is crammed with jargon, doublespeak, oxymoron’s, and cliché. It wouldn’t be unusual to hear along the corridors of corporate America, team members in a meeting “calling out” to one another, or emphasizing the need to “get their ducks in a row.” And it gets worse if you work in a tech company—you exist in a world where the jargon can reach even higher levels of baloney—and that’s before we even consider the vast valley of acronyms!

That said, there are some ‘buzz words’ that are actually important, despite them being part of the jargon wheelhouse. ‘Data visualization’ is a good example. Today, we’ll take a closer look at what that is and why it shouldn’t be consigned to the back catalogue of business-speak.

Data what?

For most of the above sayings or phrases there is some good, simple and practical thinking behind them—they don’t become cliché for nothing, right? ‘Grab the low hanging fruit’ is, behind the lame expression, smart advice. Data visualization is an even simpler concept: as the name suggests, it is the presentation of data or information in pictorial or graphical form. Usually, data visualization is used to put together large amounts of information in an engaging manner to make it quicker and easier to understand for your business’s decision makers. It also shows new patterns that are important for predicting future business outcomes or gleaning new insights. By making use of good data visualization, companies can take otherwise static information and ‘drill down’ to get more detail and discover new ideas and gain new perspectives.

Data…so what?

Okay, this sounds convenient and a better way to approach certain information. But it’s not just a fun and engaging way to present important aspects of your business stats and how it functions—there is science behind it. The way our brains process information means that seeing complicated information in graph or chart form is easier than having to study reams and reams of spreadsheets or lengthy pages of a report.

Big Data is a relatively recent phenomenon, but one that is here to stay—in fact, the amount data we produce every day is only going to get larger, deeper and more complex. And as that happens we need to find ways of parsing through it and finding the information that will give us business value.

This should be seen as an opportunity for companies to tailor their services to fit with their customers better. Before the data explosion and ability to carry out data visualization, it was a struggle for most businesses to reach the level of insight that they can today, by comparison. As we ‘move forward’ we can hope to know more about our customers and clients, as well as our competition and the market we work in. And as data continues to evolve, we can use visualization techniques to advance our businesses along with it.

More than a pretty picture 

By utilizing good data visualization, your organization can:

• Discover aspects of your business that need attention
• Understand influences that lead to certain customer behavior
• Prioritize the most important functions of your business
• Forecast sales and other important bottom line stats

Infragistics has purpose-built solutions that put data visualization for your business first. ReportPlus is one such solution, allowing you to securely get the most out of your data by bringing a self-service style Business Intelligence (BI) to your organization. Create, access and collaborate over rich visualizations and dashboards on any device while on the move or in the office. And because the platform is built by user experience experts and designed specifically for business users, you can create a highly functioning dashboard in minutes, and with a touch or click you can share with team members and other colleagues based anywhere. 

ReportPlus enables:

• A drag-and-drop experience to connect all your popular data sources
• Easily chosen visualization types and templates with a quick swipe
• Field filters at a tap or click
• Your dashboard to live in the cloud or on-premises
• Instant sharing

To bring self-service data visualization and BI to your organization, try ReportPlus free for 30 days!