What’s the Best Way to Visualize Data?

Regardless of the industry you are in, your businesses or organizations is sure to benefit immensely when you effectively organize and analyze your data. The data could be regarding sales, clients, imports/exports, hours, production or anything else used to evaluate the activities of your organization. Data visualization is a way of presenting data in a way that people can understand just by looking at it, as opposed to reading long data-heavy reports. Visualized data may include a variety of charts and graphs. Here are five of the top benefits of data visualization to consider for your business.

1. Improved Communication

Whether you are meeting with staff, board members, or potential investors, being able to communicate processes and results is vital. Data visualization will not only make your information easier to understand, but it will also make it look more impressive. It will improve communication between you and your audience, leaving more time for questions and discussion. You’ll notice that people respond more positively to data visualization than they do to raw data. The visual format really helps get ideas across in a way that helps streamline communication.

2. Faster Course Correction

When you are using a data visualization tool and depicting information with graphs and charts, you will be able to see problems faster. The faster you see problems increasing, the quicker you will be able to analyze what is impacting the difficulties and making course corrections. Course corrections are deliberate actions intended to correct a problem in the processes or procedures. Effective data visualization will help decision-makers and senior managers get back on track by helping them understand data sources at a glance.

3. Identifying Trends

Data visualization will make trends significantly more apparent than looking at raw data will. When you’ve identified positive trends, you can lean into those trends in a way that benefits your business. On the flip side, when you identify negative trends, you can pull your team together to explore possible course corrections. Even if the trend you are identifying demonstrates a need to stay the course, it is information that will benefit your business. Observing the real-time information in a visual form gives you the insights you need more quickly.

4. Connecting Actions and Results

While working, it may be difficult to immediately see the results of your hard labor. As a business owner or organization leader, you may be too entrenched to step back and look at the big picture. Data visualization allows you to see the connections between the work you are doing and the results you are producing. This will enable you to see if the work you are putting into different areas is producing the results you expected. If its’ not, you can explore new opportunities and cut back on inefficiency. Visual data makes it easy to draw those connections and make good decisions going forwards.

5. Improved Discussions

Data visualization will enable you to compare projections to actual results easily. You can also break down the details of your operation in different ways so that you can lay the foundation for productive discussions. Planning meetings and staff meetings without hard data to work off of is pointless—you can’t successfully make plans in the abstract. Visual data will allow you to build on real information and make changes, corrections, or enhancements to your operation based on real data findings.

The benefits of data visualization are clear, and you may feel excited and ready to move forward immediately. If you’re not sure how to go about creating graphical representations of your raw data, there’s no reason to worry. There are companies, like TIBCO, offering software that provides real-time data analysis and visualization. Using their software and services will lay the groundwork for the best approaches to your data. You will be provided with easy-to-use options, so you can explore new ways to present your data trends until you feel you find a format that provides the best presentation.

You may discover that different forms of charts and graphs work better for different data sets and areas of your business. TIBCO gives you the freedom to work with multiple options for visualization. Even with limited experience in this form of data analysis, all business operations can quickly create impressive presentations with this easy-to-use software.