Renowned analytics academic Thomas H. Davenport predicted that “every company has big data in its future, and every company will eventually be in the data business.”
With 97% of organizations surveyed by New Vantage Partners currently investing in data initiatives, it’s clear the time has arrived. Yet still, only 47% indicated they’re competing on data and analytics, and only 19% believe they’ve successfully established a data culture. So despite all this investment, something’s clearly still missing.
“In a world of more data, the companies with more data-literate people are the ones that are going to win,” says Miro Kazakoff, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan. So how does an organization bridge this gap, developing the kind of data-literate people and organizational data culture needed to survive?
While there’s no quick or easy solution to this problem, it’s important to note that only 8% of the organizations surveyed believe that technology limitations are their main roadblock. The other 92% of executives point instead to culture as their greatest challenge in this arena.
It cannot be denied that adding data scientists and investing in DataOps can improve and accelerate the process of getting your data to where it needs to be, but don’t discount visual analytics and increased interactivity as a part of an organization-wide solution for moving your culture forward.
Does this mean every employee needs to have access to all of the data? Of course, that’s not typically safe, wise, or possible. But by implementing visual analytics with increased interactivity for relevant data, more employees can directly improve their own understanding and retention, by producing their own thoughts, within their workflow, as opposed to receiving prepared messages, such as only the kind that static dashboards or traditional reporting may present to them.
What’s the Role of Visualizations?
Visual analytics explore and analyze datasets visually, and their tools and techniques can aggregate data from disparate sources for output in data visualizations. This can mean giving separate areas of a workforce a classic dashboard, which can take a standalone form (and often static, for example as KPIs), to curate specific data points, all for a specific user’s consumption.
And we’ve all encountered crazily complicated infographics, which can be so loaded down by a list of required points to illustrate, they provoke headaches for users who can’t even figure out what it’s all meant to be showing in the first place.