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Unit 8: Usages, Benefits and Success of Business Analytics and Data Visualization

Visualisations look better and attract more attention than the textual format. They are also Notes
more likely to keep the audience interested in your presentation.
Although data visualisations are easier to understand and look more attractive to the audience,
it is crucial to achieve a perfect balance between visual appeal and functionality. Data visualisation
is in the first place used to improve efficiency of the communicated information. A beautiful
presentation which, however, fails to emphasise relevant data or is not clear enough is of little
value. For that reason it is highly important to make sure that the presented data are clear and
understandable, and only then focus on aesthetically appealing and attention drawing design.
Just as important is to support the communicated information with additional materials such as
official statistic data, facts, examples, etc., if you want the audience to accept your view/
interpretation.

In the end, it is necessary to mention that the use of data visualisation does not necessarily
exclude the textual format or vice versa. If you are dealing with numbers, you cannot avoid
them completely no matter how sophisticated visualisations you use. Nevertheless, it is a lot
easier to make a point and help the audience understand the importance of the communicated
information if you also use visual presentation along the numbers.

Self Assessment

State True or False:
1. High-quality data must be integrated and accessible across your organization.
2. Take an enterprise approach to data management and analytics to effect better decisions.
3. It is a very difficult to understand a dial or graph than numbers.

4. If you are dealing with numbers, you cannot avoid them completely no matter how
sophisticated visualisations you use.
5. Transparency is not necessary for successful business analytics projects.

8.2 Benefits of Business Analytics and Data Visualization

In this section, we will discuss the benefits of Business Analytics and Data Visualization.

8.2.1 Benefits of Business Analytics

Business analytics is a term that encompasses many things. To put it simply, studying previous
business performance to gain insight into what future business performance will be is business
analytics. Business analysis employs many different methods to help them with this including
data and applications. You may have also heard of the term ‘business intelligence’ which is very
similar to business analytics in that there is also the collection and study of data. However, the
difference between the two is that business analytics strives to find new and better ways while
business intelligence is about using tried and true methods. Check out Transportation Consulting
& Management Services, for more details.
As you can imagine, for one medium sized company, there would be a substantial amount of
data and analysis needed to make good decisions. And when analyzing a company, you need to
analyze each part of the business, e.g. production, human resources, environmental etc.

Example: With a company that manufactures products, just the getting the finished
products to the customers is a big undertaking that would result in a lot of data that needed to be
processed.

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