Businesses generate significant amounts of data daily, collecting information on a wide range of sources such as income, performance of marketing campaigns, customer interactions, employee management production metrics and more. With tons of data coming in, it is easy for businesses to get lost in the figures and miss the important stories that the data is telling. Data visualisation is key to overcoming this issue.
What is Data Visualisation?
Data visualisation is a term used to describe the representation of information and data in visuals such as graphs, charts and maps. Visual presentation of data helps users see, identify and understand trends and patterns in the data.
Data visualisation tools and technologies are constantly evolving to analyse large amounts of data for leaders to make strategic and tactical decisions based on facts and figures.
Why use Data Visualisation?
Data visualisation helps organisations collect large amounts of data and process it into visuals that are easy to digest. Visuals deliver information effectively because the human eye is drawn to colours and patterns; we can quickly identify yellow from red or a triangle from a rectangle. When we look at data from a visual chart or graph, we can identify trends and outliers quickly and internalise the information. Thus, visualising data is a powerful and effective tool in business analysis.
With thorough data analysis, businesses can identify important insights that communicate ideas and insights and enable better decision-making to drive the organisation forward.
Ways Data Visualisation Helps With Strategic Business Decision-Making:
- See the Broader Context: Data visualisation enables users to understand the broader context of their data and the higher-level information that lies within it. As such, users can then identify trends and patterns that are unlikely to be seen when looking at the numbers alone.
- Identify Significant Insights: Looking at the story behind the data can bring clarity that can lead to more informed business strategies, operations and decisions. Data visualisation can show how the business is performing, what should be changed, where resources should be focused and identify any opportunities that arise.
- Be Confident in Decisions: Data enables organisations to make decisions based on specific numbers and understandings. With these in-depth insights into key metrics, you have the necessary tools and knowledge to be confident in your decisions.
- Track Trends Over Time: Trends over time will start to emerge in the data, which gives you the ability to address any sign of a decrease in performance immediately.
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a suite of business intelligence, reporting, and data visualisation products and services for individuals and teams. It lets users create rich, interactive data visualisations from several sources to identify business insights that drive the success of an organisation.
Cahoot Learning’s program ‘Ultimate Starter’s Guide to Power BI’ gives learners a thorough understanding of Power BI and the art of creating insightful business dashboards. It provides analysts, project team members and business leaders the knowledge to implement visualisation techniques with an in-depth understanding of Power BI.
