If a picture is worth a thousand words, data visualization is worth thousands of bits and bytes of information.
For example, Visual Capitalist provides an effective visualization that predicts daily internet activity will produce 463 exabytes (1018 bytes) of data by 2025, adding to the 44 zettabytes (1021) already in storage.
Visualizations do not replace data tables for collecting, organizing and analyzing digital information. Instead, they present data in easily understood infographics, videos, interactive maps and dashboards that update in real time.
“Doing data visualization right is a crucial task for today’s businesses. With access to high volumes of data continually increasing, seeing the right data in a quickly-digestible format is a fast track to business insights and solid, ROI-based decisions,” according to DatAvail, an analytics service provider.
What Business Operations Benefit From the Use of Visualizations?
Data and analytics support professionals’ efforts to make decisions more quickly and with higher degrees of confidence about resource allocation, supply chain relationships and innovating processes and products. Visually depicting that data presents a clear and concise understanding of trends and relationships among the data sets in business operations such as:
Sales and Marketing
With billions of buyers spending trillions of dollars online, visualizing data on real-time dashboards accelerates insights into market behavior, high-value prospect and customer profiles and the impact of online advertising.
Healthcare
As telemedicine technologies make more data available to patients, visualizations that reflect an individual’s vital statistics and health trends may influence the adoption of healthful behaviors and encourage better healthcare literacy.
Finance
Visualizations of data into operations ranging from employee performance to the efficiency of business units provide management and executive leadership with “big picture” views that can help identify issues in resource allocation and investment return.
Logistics
Supply chain visibility is critical to performance, particularly for companies with vendors worldwide. Real-time dashboard visualizations into ordering, pricing and shipping and storage costs connect “what’s happening?” with “what needs to happen?”
Technology
As trends toward artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other emerging technologies climb, visualizations of existing efficiencies in data collection, organization and analysis enable innovation of information technology, management systems and analytics processes.
eLearning Industry notes the following facts about visualization to support the reason why presenting data this way is beneficial:
- Ninety percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
- We commit verbal words to our short-term memory, but we commit visual information to our long-term memory, which is easier for us to recall.
- The brain processes emotions and visual information in the same area of the brain, meaning humans glean powerful, emotional significance from visuals.
What Expertise Is Necessary for a Career in Data Visualization?
As visualizations become more valuable as a competitive advantage in consumer and B2B markets, organizations will need professionals who can transform data into easily understood, memorable formats that support strategy, decision-making and communication.
A Master of Business Administration (MBA) with a Concentration in Data Science program, such as that offered online by Henderson State University, equips graduates for roles in visualization through studies in analytics, evidenced-based management and other advanced topics in data science.
Learn more about Henderson State University’s online MBA in Data Science program.
