06.26.2023 Executive Data Bytes - Delivering Business Value Faster with Visual Analytics

Executive Data Bytes

Tech analysis for the busy executive.

Welcome to another release of Executive Data Bytes! American Mathematician John Tukey, once said: “the greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see”. This edition will discuss how visual analytics delivers value faster for your business.

Focus piece: “Visual Analytics”

Executive Summary

Visuals are an important part of our lives, particularly in the corporate world. For presenting our best ideas, be it at work, conferences or that important team meeting, we tend to put these ideas on slides that projects the information just simple enough, and yet in an appealing manner, keeping the audience interested. With this article by Qlik, we will discuss visual analytics, what it is and why it is important.

Key Takeaways

• To begin with, what is visual analytics? Visual analytics is the process of analyzing and interpreting data using visual representations, such as graphs, charts, and maps. It combines sophisticated tools and techniques to transform complex datasets into visual formats that are easier to understand and explore. By visually representing data, individuals can identify patterns, trends, outliers, and relationships, leading to valuable insights and informed decision-making. Visual analytics goes beyond simple data visualization by providing interactive capabilities and advanced analytical functionalities, enabling users to interact with the data directly within the visualizations. Next, why is it important?
• Competitive advantage: In today's data-driven business landscape, gaining a competitive edge is crucial. Visual analytics enables organizations to extract maximum value from their data, uncovering hidden trends, market opportunities, and customer preferences. By leveraging these insights, businesses can make informed decisions, drive innovation, optimize operations, and deliver better products or services, ultimately staying ahead of the competition.
• Enhanced decision-making: Visual analytics enables faster and more informed decision-making by presenting data in a visual format. By visualizing complex datasets, individuals can quickly identify trends, patterns, and outliers, facilitating a deeper understanding of the data. This accelerated comprehension empowers decision-makers to make timely and data-driven choices that can drive business success.
• Actionable insights: Visual analytics helps transform raw data into actionable insights. By visualizing data through graphs, charts, and interactive dashboards, professionals can uncover valuable information and derive meaningful conclusions. These insights enable organizations to identify opportunities, address challenges, optimize processes, and make strategic decisions that positively impact the bottom line.
• Democratization of data: Visual analytics tools promote data literacy and accessibility across the organization. By providing self-service capabilities, individuals from various departments and roles can explore and interact with data without depending solely on data specialists or IT teams. This empowers employees to take ownership of data analysis, discover new insights, and contribute to the organization's overall data-driven culture.

Focus piece: “5 Ways To Grow Business Value Through Analytics”

Executive Summary

With the what and why out of the way, it begs the question of how do you use visual analytics to immediately deliver actionable insights and valuable results for your organization. This piece by Forbes shows practical steps that can be taken to achieve this and it starts with providing specific goals and related KPIs to help teams measure success.

Key Takeaways

• Provide specific goals and their related KPIs to help teams measure success:  Leveraging visual analytics offers an immediate avenue to drive tangible value within your business. Teams can effectively measure success by establishing clear and well-defined goals with corresponding Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This empowers teams to swiftly develop purpose-built data assets, such as interactive visualizations, that allow for real-time monitoring of critical business processes and informed decision-making at key junctures specific to their respective domains. By harnessing the power of visual analytics, organizations can optimize operations, identify areas for improvement, and unlock valuable insights to propel their business forward.
• Support development of data literacy or confidence when working with data: Investing in your workforce with data literacy training sessions, third-party programs, and more fosters a data-driven culture. By prioritizing analytics proficiency for all employees, not just data experts, you empower them to explore, understand, and communicate with data effectively. This cultivates informed decision-making, identifies opportunities, and elevates your organization's analytics maturity.
• Identify subject matter experts in each department : Engaging subject matter experts within each department is crucial for obtaining timely feedback and providing essential business context to data and analytics teams. By identifying these experts, organizations can ensure effective collaboration and alignment between data initiatives and specific business needs. This partnership facilitates the development of actionable insights and empowers all stakeholders to leverage the outputs for further analysis and decision-making. By leveraging the expertise of individuals across departments, organizations can unlock the true value of data, drive informed decision-making, and cultivate a pervasive data-driven culture throughout the organization.

Focus piece: “How To Build A Data Strategy” 

Executive Summary

Knowing what, why and how when it comes to delivering value with visual analytics, one would believe that they have all it takes to get the job done. While you’re not far from right, seeing how other organizations take this information and deliver value for their stakeholders, is what will truly boost your business. In this piece by Forbes, we will see examples of organizations that used visual analytics to deliver business value.

Key Takeaways

• DTDC Express Limited, an Indian courier delivery service, utilized Tableau to visually map and analyze data, aiming to address delivery delays. By segmenting the data based on location, product, and various service parameters, the organization gained a comprehensive understanding of the issue. This data-driven approach played a crucial role in achieving the business objective of restoring pre-COVID profitability within a remarkable nine-month timeframe. Moreover, DTDC expanded visibility into delivery operations beyond the purview of the operations team. By providing access to senior managers, a wider range of individuals could now monitor and make informed decisions at both tactical and strategic levels, thereby enhancing overall service performance. As a result, senior management now has the ability to examine daily trends and derive actionable insights. This empowers teams to identify new revenue sources while delivering exceptional customer service to existing clientele, ultimately driving sustainable business growth.
• Emami, a prominent player in the personal care and healthcare industry in India, leveraged customized visualizations to monitor key financial and operational metrics. By utilizing tailored visualizations, the company gained a comprehensive overview of purchase orders, enabling quick identification and investigation of those that had exceeded their expected timeline. Furthermore, the Emami team employed Tableau to develop a brand performance heatmap, a specialized data asset that provides insights into the growth generated by different brands. This powerful tool enables the company to make data-driven recommendations to retailers, optimizing marketing strategies and maximizing growth potential. Through these strategic visualizations, Emami empowers its teams to make informed decisions, identify areas for improvement, and drive business growth based on real-time data analysis. By harnessing the power of tailored visualizations and purpose-built data assets, Emami solidifies its position as a data-driven organization at the forefront of the industry.
• Zeotap, a data company specializing in customer understanding and behavior prediction, prioritized enhancing data literacy and upskilling their workforce. They capitalized on the opportunity of 90 days of complimentary Tableau training and consistently conducted internal training sessions. To stay informed and inspired, their Analytics team actively explores analytics best practices and draws daily inspiration from the Viz of the Day. By expanding the implementation of Tableau beyond the Analytics team to encompass sales, executives, sales enablement, and marketing teams, Zeotap has enabled a wider group of individuals to access in-depth sales and revenue insights. This expanded access has resulted in increased familiarity and confidence when working with data. 

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