Over the past year or two, an increasing number of businesses have adopted big data solutions to manage and analyze their data, and you need to jump on the big data bandwagon too if you want to stay abreast of your competitors.Big data can be greatly beneficial to businesses, but it will not reach its full potential unless it is properly visualized.
Here is a look at how you can visualize big data for your business.
Benefits of Big Data
Big data is more than just a vast and varied collection of data; it can help you boost your business intelligence and perform certain tasks more effectively and efficiently. If you are not leveraging all the information that is available to you, you may miss out on opportunities to improve your business insight and achieve greater value.
A big data solution enables you to:
- Discover new data patterns and relationships that have an impact on your business
- Gather more accurate and detailed information to enhance decision-making
- Predict outcomes and trends more precisely
- Gain a better understanding of the preferences and buying habits of your customers
- Develop products and services that can better meet the needs of your customers
- Identify and fix operational problems more efficiently
Understanding Big Data Visualization
Big data consists of an enormous amount of information, and it can mean different things to different people. As such, it can be difficult to make it comprehensible to human beings. Big data visualization is the act of making big data easy to understand and analyze, and it enables you to gain clear and valuable insights from your data.
According to an article entitled “Visualization for Big Data”, David McCandless said that data is like new soil and visualizations are the flowers of the plants that are planted in the soil. When big data is properly visualized, it can be an effective tool for conveying critical information that can lead to better decision-making.
Using the Right Big Data Visualization Tools
Big data visualization involves using the sizes, colors and positions of abstract elements to convey information. In order to be really actionable, it should provide an appropriate amount of interactivity. It has to be well-designed, user-friendly, comprehensible, approachable and meaningful. As technology changes, new tools are constantly being developed to harness the value of data visualization for application across different industries.
Examples of data visualization tools that are widely used today include maps, charts, diagrams, pictures, infographics and videos. These tools can vary significantly in terms of effectiveness, depending on the type of information that you are conveying, the audience that you are presenting the information to and the objective of the presentation.
Businesses are gathering more data than ever before, and they are finding it increasingly difficult to manage, analyze and visualize their data. Information is only powerful when it is comprehensible. Using the right big data visualization tools will enable you to derive maximum value from your data.
About the Author: John McMalcolm is a freelance writer who writes on a wide range of subjects, from social media marketing to Cloud computing.
