Data Visualization: Old Practice, New Value

While visualization tools can help organizations get new value from their data, there are some caveats.

Data visualization is not new.

During a recent International Institute for Analytics (IIA) webinar, Bill Franks, chief analytics officer for Teradata and author of several books includingTaming the Big Data Tidal Wave and the forthcoming The Analytics Revolution, shared a visualization created in 1869 to illustrate Napolean’s troop losses during his invasion of Russia in 1812. Those early visualizations required lots of manual labor to collect and then illustrate the data, chores performed by a data specialist.

Despite advancements through the years, visualization remained largely the purview of data specialists until visualization capabilities were added to desktop tools such as Microsoft Excel. Yet even using those tools, creating visualizations was a labor intensive process that involved lots of cutting, pasting and manual entry of data.

Today, however, modern tools make it easy to create robust data visualizations, Franks said, and to combine text with visuals so analytics can “tell a story.
On the “outer edge” of data visualization, some companies are beginning to leverage technologies used for video gaming and other immersive experiences to produce compelling visualizations, he said, noting that Facebook purchased virtual reality headset maker Oculus in March.

Data Visualization Benefits

Unlike prior tools, today’s data visualization tools make it easy to make changes – generally just by pointing and clicking – connect to multiple different types of data sources and share visualizations. “It’s easy to explore and pivot and go around and look at data. You can explore more questions, more deeply, than you could before,” Franks said.

Tools from such companies as SAS, Tableau, Tibco Spotfire, QlikView and MicroStrategy facilitate this kind of exploration, which can result in discovering trends and patterns that were difficult to identify before, Franks said.

He said these tools offer several “huge value propositions,” among them:

• Better visuals help bring data and analysis to life
• They support decision making rather than simply reporting what happened
• They democratize data with flexible, self-service environments

I wrote about the democratic data trend last week. I like how Franks described it during the webinar: “Users can analyze data as they see fit not as someone saw fit to allow them.”

How Data Discovery Is Like Yogurt

Franks described how a yogurt shop near his home, where a server dished up the yogurt and toppings, charging extra for each topping, had closed. It was replaced with a self-service store that allows consumers to mix and match flavors and toppings and pay for the product by weight. The shuttered store was “analogous to the traditional IT model of controlling and dispensing data to users as they see fit,” he said, while the newer store represents “a discovery model where IT enables users to explore data with everything from visualization tools to deep analytics tools.”

Just as consumers might help yogurt stores discover new flavors by experimenting with the existing ones, business users might help IT organizations discover new types of data analysis they want to put into production, Franks said.

“The central command-and-control environment cannot handle the load of the variety of analytics from the variety of people under the variety of methodologies that need to be applied. You have to allow users figure out how to do it on their own, then you can operationalize and harden the process,” he said.

Data Visualization Caveats

There are some caveats with data visualization tools, Franks said. It is easy to get carried away, he pointed out, advising folks to “remember that visualization is about having an impact and getting a point across, versus just using something because it is cool.”

He presented examples of visualizations created using the same data sets, in which it was much easier to understand the information in visualizations that utilized a simple bar chart or pie chart instead of the ones that included 3D features and other fancy but distracting graphics.

While bar charts and pie graphs are broadly relevant, Franks said, “newer tools are not meant to be as broadly relevant or applicable” and thus are not appropriate for certain types of data. It takes some practice to determine which types of tools work best for different types of data.

Another example: A visualization showing a person connected to others in an organization with arrows is a great way to illustrate social or network connections. You could use a spreadsheet to present the same information, Franks said, but “it would be very difficult to understand the information the way you can with a visualization (that uses the arrows).”

“Always default to the simplest thing you can do to get your point across,” Franks advised. He also encouraged matching data visualizations to the audience you are targeting. So, for example, you might want to focus on distilling down key points for executives.

Perhaps most important, organizations must not view data visualization tools as “a magic bullet to solve problems,” Franks said.

“You are still going to have to implement something and operationalize data to get value from it. Once you have that ‘ah-ha’ moment, you still have a lot of work to do from there to make it pay off for your organization. It’s not just about acquiring data, it’s not just analyzing it to get a discovery, it’s making sure you can deploy it to different people in different ways and almost instantaneously.”

The Top 10 Questions Every Brand Must Answer To Grow In 2015

Every marketeer faces a dizzying array of choices in terms of strategy, tactics, and tools through which to reach their customers and inspire them to buy your products. As the media landscape becomes more fractured and the tools more varied, it’s more important than ever to stay focused on the right priorities that will ensure short-term and long-term success. With that in mind here are the top ten questions every brand must answer if they hope to grow in 2015.

1. What is your brand’s purpose? Every marketer is now aware that Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z generations are looking to brands to be more responsible in exchange for their product purposes. As such, a clear definition of your company purpose is critical to capturing their attention and converting their support to sales.

2. What is your brands story? Once you have defined your brand’s purpose, mission, and vision you need to be able to distil that into a brand story that employees and customers want to share. Only then will you unlock the power of social technologies to amplify your message and build your customer community.

3. How do you align your leadership, employees, and partners around that brand story? Too often marketers think only in terms of how they will share their story with customers and ignore the need to create a company culture that is in alignment with that story.

4. How do you align your corporate citizenship, sustainability and foundation efforts? For decades each one of these areas had been treated as distinct silos within a company matrix. As such, they are often insufficiently connected or aligned with a brand’s story. Only when they are all pointed in the same direction can they amplify one another to generate marketing efficiencies that improve your bottom line.

5. How do you align your company and product brand stories? Many corporate brands have chosen to remain effectively unknown and lead with their product brands. With the new demands for transparency and accountability, company brands are now rising to the challenge of defining their story and aligning their product brands within it.

6. How do you align your external marketing with your internal culture?There is nothing more destructive to a business than for a customer to discover that a brand’s marketing is very different to the customer’s experience. By extension, very easy for an employee to become disillusioned when they see that a brand is telling its customers one thing when their experience inside the company is another.

7. What strategies must you use to tell your story effectively using social technologies? Too often brands bring a broadcast and self-directed mentality to social tools that turn on dialogue, interaction, and intimacy. It’s not surprising then that they find that their employees’ time and marketing spend is wasted.

8. How must you use each social media channel to capture the attention of existing and new customers? Each channel presents a unique way to command the attention of different audiences and to inspire them to amplify the company’s brand story. Only with clear communication architecture can that story and these channels be sufficiently aligned to build the brand and its business.

9. How do you share that brands story effectively at a local level? The people closest to a community are the ones best qualified to share a story. As such, every brand faces the challenge of localizing its overarching story in a way that makes it meaningful and relevant to customers in order to win their attention and purchasing preference.

10. How do you establish your leadership at a global level? Irrespective of your company size, you can now lead a global conversation once you have clearly articulated your point of view on a given cultural conversation related to your products and their benefits. Any ambition smaller than that undervalues the reach and impact of the web, social media, and mobile phones.

Each one of these questions is important in their own right, but taken together they are critical for the short and long-term success of a brand in today’s social business marketplace.