Skip to main content

How Data Visualization Helps Enhance the Value of Business Intelligence


How Data Visualization Helps Enhance the Value of Business Intelligence



By Frank Poladi



With massive amounts of data available both internally and externally, making sense of the information isn't easy. However, business intelligence (BI) tools make it easier. With a robust BI solution in place, it becomes possible to mine data from diverse databases for insights, trends, and analysis. Business intelligence is hot right now, but not all BI solutions are created equally. As powerful as these tools are and as richly detailed as reports may be, the results can be difficult for the average manager to decipher - and more importantly, use. Fortunately, it's not necessary to puzzle over stacks of business intelligence reports when you have a solution that includes data visualization tools.

What is data visualization? Visualizations are a graphical way of displaying data such as pie charts, bar charts, and trend lines. In addition to these familiar charts and graphs, data visualization takes other graphical and symbolic forms. You likely encounter various forms of visualizations day in, day out. For example, if you commute to work each day, the real-time traffic maps you look at use data visualization to indicate the flow of traffic. Red lines along your route instantly and visually tell you that you're in for a long ride. Based on a quick glance at your route, you may decide to leave early, take an alternate route, work from home for the day, or stop at your favorite coffee shop while you wait for traffic to clear.

The same concept can be applied to business data mined and displayed on a BI dashboard. A BI dashboard is an on screen display featuring visualizations based on the data most relevant to your needs. They provide at-a-glance visual information just as the real-time traffic map did in the example above. No matter what you need to track in order to excel in your job, you can set up your BI dashboard to display that data using visual gauges, graphs, charts, and other graphical elements.
While you could view that information using traditional means, data visualization brings it to life and makes it more meaningful. For example, imagine a real-time traffic website without data visualization. Instead of being able to instantly see if your route has green, yellow, or red lines indicating the speed of traffic, you'd have to scan through row after row of text describing each freeway and its current traffic conditions. You may eventually get the same information and come to the same conclusion, but this process is time-consuming, inefficient, and uninspiring. Instead of being a helpful tool that can enrich your life, it becomes yet another chore.

Data visualization has become increasingly sophisticated with a myriad of dashboard objects available. Not only can you set up graphs and gauges to display relevant data, it's possible to drill down, change views, and more (depending on the data visualization software you have). While there's no denying the power of modern business intelligence tools, without integrated data visualization, they're not nearly as smart as they could be.

Frank Poladi is the author of "How Data Visualization Helps Enhance the Value of Business Intelligence". In the article he demonstrates how data visualization software can help enhance the value of business intelligence because businesses now have the ability to visualize data in a simplistic way and present it to upper level management and consumers.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Frank_Poladi/1415379







Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Data Effectively & Creatively to Protect Our Elderly Population

Exploring the Root Cause of Medicare Claims Fraud Interoperability has become the new buzz word within healthcare.  The goal is admirable: use computer systems to easily exchange data.  It sounds so simple.  We are even at a place with machine learning and artificial intelligence where all kinds of information can be easily shared.  So it makes me stop to think, why is Medicare fraud still so prevalent.  If we are sharing information and we can detect patterns, then why are we still having this issue.  It seems that the answer lies in the fact that while the capability exists, the willingness to share data across the right platforms still is not being done.  One carrier may have data within its organization while one regulatory body may internally share information and on the other hand providers respectively share information among one another.  Yet, if the American healthcare system is not a system at all, in that all the parts do not integr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data Wrangling — Some Tips during this covid season

In this covid season, thought of sharing some tips and sample codes on Data Wrangling. After getting a glance of Google Colab, my go to language for data wrangling has been Python. This blog hence uses Colab and Pandas on Python for data wrangling. Most of the data collected has format related issues because they are collected without the use of a software. These days, with tools like Google Forms coming into picture, it is much better, but when you have old data to deal with in its row form, there is no escape from formatting it and getting it to the shape that you need it to be in. This blog shows how to use colab, pandas and lambda functions to quickly format some data. I had written an earlier blog few days back on  Colab  and how to import data from excel to Colab. So, I shall skip that part now. Let us say, the below is the data that we need to format (the admission number column) and we need all the data to be in the format: YYYY-Num We can do this quickly using datafra...
Post a Comment
Read more