Data visualization and visual analytics help businesses understand the value of their data 

In today's information age, every business seeks to get the most out of their data they glean every day. Companies understand the value of their data to explore further and drive innovation. But they lack germane skills and tools that can help them derive meaning from their data. Surprisingly, data is the new oil for organizations of all sizes and types. It significantly allows decision-makers to identify trends and patterns in their data journey and move faster and work more smoothly and efficiently.

Leveraging data visualization and visual analytics can be effective solutions, enabling analytics users to delve deep into the world of data. Typically, data visualization is the presentation of big data in a visual context, whereas visual analytics accentuates analytical reasoning about data and coalesces computational analysis techniques with interactive visualizations.

Data visualization: Moving Towards Big Data Future

Data visualization helps businesses to recognize trends, patterns, and contexts that often go obscure in text-based data. Despite displaying data in typical spreadsheets, charts, and graphs, it represents data in more sophisticated formats using infographics, maps, detailed bars, pie and fever charts, and communicates relationships between data values.

Additionally, data visualization is a quick, easy way to convey concepts universally. It can identify areas that need attention or improvement, clarify which factors influence customer behaviors, assist leaders to understand which products to place where and envisage sales volumes as well.

According to Simon Samuel, Head of Customer Value Modeling for a large bank in the UK, data visualization is going to change the way our analysts work with data. They're going to be expected to respond to issues more rapidly. And they'll need to be able to dig for more insights – look at data differently, more imaginatively. Data visualization will promote creative data exploration.

Making Data-Driven Organization Possible with Visual Analytics

Having a visual representation of business data can help an organization to better conceptualize connections and proportions and explore real meaning in the data. Visual analytics here plays a crucial role, representing data in an easily understandable manner. It combines automated analysis techniques to deliver interactive visualizations over data. Previously, there were only a few data sources to assess information as everything was fixed-format and predefined, and only the IT department could perform so. This significantly caused non-IT professionals to wait for a long time to receive their reports and insights. However, the advent of visual analytics has curbed this challenge, especially for non-technical professionals.

Visual analytics uses data visualization techniques such as 3D scatter plots, network graphs, interactive bar graphs, and animated sequence assembly, among others. As it runs on a code which in turn can be compiled into any programming software platform, this analytics technique can be used in all industries. It can capture the changes in a business environment in real-time and allow top management to take the best-suited business decision.

The demand for data visualization and visual analytics tools will likely rise exponentially. This is majorly because large-scale organizations have voluminous amounts of data and information to process. And for this, they require effective skills and tools and techniques to gather, assess, process and visualize the data to reap required outcomes while driving the right decision to meet their goals and objectives.