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

A Forrester study outlines that 60—73% of the data within enterprises still needs to be explored. Accenture’s analysis complements these findings by reporting that only about 32% of companies realize tangible value from 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. For instance, data is often held up in infrastructure silos and within complex tools and protocols. Business users cannot access the data or get actionable insights from it. This 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

Advances in data analytics mechanisms and innovations in AI have led to more complex and multiple data storage, analysis and governance systems. A standalone data warehouse must be optimized for such complexities, compelling data architects to rely on multiple data lakes, warehouses, and other specialized systems to process modern-day data.

A lakehouse is a new data storage and management approach that combines the best of both worlds – data lakes and data warehouses. It offers a new and open architecture enabled by better system design by merging ease of access and support for enterprise analytics capabilities found in data warehouses with the relatively low cost and flexibility of data lakes.

What Value Can Enterprises Derive from it?

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.

Infrastructure and human resources are often 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 and security of data.

Discovering Insights Through Data Visualization

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, 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 can 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 formats, 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 seamlessly, comprehensively, and reliably.

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

Get in touch to learn more.