Why Enterprises Struggle to Unlock the Value Hidden in Data and How Data Visualization Holds the Key

Data guides corporate strategies to improve processes, drive innovation, and identify emerging trends. But for many business users, the data remains inaccessible: it’s difficult to comprehend, hard to act on quickly, and lacks the level of transparency that would enable a competitive advantage.

A Forrester study outlines that 60-73% of the data within enterprises remains untapped. Accenture’s analysis complements these findings by reporting that only about 32% of the companies realize tangible value out of their data initiatives. Indeed, data remains opaque to most business users and, hence, doesn’t impact business outcomes as expected.

As it stands, unlocking the hidden value of data remains challenging for enterprises. Often, for instance, data is held up in the infrastructure silos and within complex tools and protocols. Business users are unable to access the data or get actionable insights from it. This makes complicates the process of deriving the holistic value of data for meticulous decision making.

Along those lines, this article sheds light on the various reasons businesses struggle to unlock the true potential of data and how data visualization can help.

Why Businesses Struggle to Unlock the True Potential of Data

A Sloppy Reactive Approach

This is a long-term problem with organizations as they follow a disorganized approach to back up, store, analyze, and manage data. Data gets restricted inside inaccessible silos. Often, infrastructure and human resources are added for swift and convenient resolution of information related issues without considering the long-term implications and enterprise-wide data management strategies. As a result, data fragmentation increases, and so do management overheads.

Data Fragmentation Challenges

Data fragmentation impacts the quality and reliability of data. The workforce often comes across different versions of the same information stored in multiple locations, thus failing to get a single version of the truth. And to make matters worse, data is spread out across multiple tools and applications, making it difficult to understand and process.

Lack of Data Controls

Failing to control data results is an opportunity missed. It impacts various business areas, including strategic planning, corporate agility, competitiveness, and customer experience. Businesses not adhering to thorough data control measures are at a considerable risk of drawbacks affecting their bottom line. It is thus imperative for organizations to set in place well-defined data governance policies for better visibility, integrity & security of data.

Discovering Insights Through Data Visualization

In order to address the problems outlined above and unlock the hidden value of data, organizations need to look for a solution that makes data accessible and easy to understand for everyone. Data visualization offers just that.

Data visualization offers an effective way of communicating information universally using visuals. This practice helps businesses quickly identify different factors impacting customer behavior, determine the scope of improvement, detect areas that need attention, understand product placement, forecast sales volume, and more.

Here’s how data visualization helps:

Better Data Analysis

Data visualization helps businesses assemble, analyze, and contextualize relevant data, thus rendering hard-to-find insights. As such, business analysts are better equipped to interpret data and make informed decisions, thereby improving corporate agility.

Quicker Decisions

Data visualization helps businesses assemble, analyze, and contextualize relevant data, thus rendering hard-to-find insights. As such, business analysts are better equipped to interpret data and make informed decisions, thereby improving corporate agility.

Decoding Complex Data

Deciphering these patterns assists business users in focusing on red-flag areas that otherwise would have remained unnoticed.

Precise Customer Sentiment Assessment

Data visualization digs deeper into customers’ sentiments, representing the analysis in reports, interactive charts, and dashboards instead of spreadsheets. Advanced data visualization tools make it easier to understand insights about the brand and the
performance of business operations. They also allow businesses to titillate the target audience’s psyche, understand the preferences and pain points, and leverage analytics to develop advanced business strategies.

Fostering Data Interaction

Data visualization facilitates ease of data access throughout an organization. Using this technique for reporting, enterprises can encourage users to discover data and manipulate it to unveil vital factors with an objective approach to decision-making. For instance, if sales suddenly decline in a target market, the company would want to know the cause. Using data visualization charts and graphs representing the product journey, they’d be able to decipher trends/deviations and correlate them to actual sales to determine the root cause.

How Ellicium’s Data Visualization Capabilities Unlock the Hidden Value of Data

At Ellicium, we help businesses create an ecosystem for data exploration, thus opening new doors to innovation. We harness the power of data visualization and dashboards to help enterprises in the following ways:

Improving Business Decisions

With Ellicium-powered visual analytics and reporting, enterprises can draw insights from the most complex datasets and dig into their business performance. This gives decision-makers a clear picture of the status of their business and the potential opportunities to boost sales and overall profitability. More profoundly, our data visualization services can help:

  • Streamline complex data representations in the form of an understandable
    format, like graphs and charts
  • Create visual data models that augment the quality, efficiency, and accuracy of data
  • Develop a holistic view of the performance of key business areas to detect
    potential problems earlier on
  • Decipher trends and identify errors in a systematic manner

Building the Ecosystem of Data Exploration

Intuitive dashboards, charts, and models enable more efficient data exploration, enabling businesses to tap into the power of trend analysis. As such, businesses remain equipped to

  • Analyze current trends against historical events
  • Detect variations in performance across different business areas
  • Identify data trends and anomalies that could serve as a basis for improvement in sales forecasting

The Final Word

Data visualization enables quick information absorption, improves insights, and drives quick decisions. It depicts the next course of action in the pipeline to improve decisions in a seamless, comprehensive, and reliable manner

Drive effective data visualization initiatives with Ellicium’s visual analytics and reporting expertise.

Get in touch to learn more.