17 Jun 2014 A picture, or 1000 words?

If you are reading this article, it is probable that you, too, are working in the rapidly evolving world of corporate performance management, business intelligence, data science, data management, or are closely associated to it.  You will be acutely aware of the unprecedented hype and interest surrounding Big Data and will be asking yourselves how your organisation can profit from the complex mash-up of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

You will have heard that data is the new oil, the new high value corporate resource which, when discovered, explored, processed and refined, will be the fuel to drive your business ahead of your competitors for years to come.  But keeping abreast with the volume, variety and velocity of Big Data is only of value if you have tools and techniques to convert it into a useable asset, and that is where today’s data discovery and visualisation platforms play their part.

As a regular reader of The Guardian, a UK-based national newspaper, I follow their “Data” section, which helps me keep abreast of how data is used in solving problems across broad spectrums of life, industry and politics. But what is especially interesting to me in this section is how data is presented through high impact visual graphics to create compelling and enlightening stories for their readers.

The guardian

As little as 10 years ago, data visualisation was, in most part, restricted to national media stations, advertising gurus and graphical designer types, who would work with data analysts to convert spreadsheet-style input data into more appealing infographics for mass consumption through TV and national press. And now, just a decade on, our appetite for highly visual information has dramatically diversified into the mass market of corporate consumers – from executive ‘C’ level managers down the ranks to entry level analysts.

The era of business storytelling and infographics is rapidly edging out the classic tabular report, pivot table and pie chart culture of the 80s and 90s.

Business intelligence tools are now expected to predict behaviour, track patterns and trends, highlight relativity and performance, all in one single interactive dashboard!

From a data perspective, I am sure you will share our sentiment that we are facing a revolution. No longer is data the fenced territory of IT departments and database administrator types, but actually that data becomes high octane in nature when put into the hands of the business people who can really act on it, take critical decisions on it and who really understand it.

IT clearly have a key role in provisioning and governing business data, ensuring consistency, query performance , platform stability, security etc., but leaving the discovery and analysis in the eager and empowered hands of the business users who can make it work for the good of the business. Working with industry leading information visualisation and discovery products, namely Tableau and Oracle Endeca, we at ClearPeaks are perfectly positioned to advise you – as an end user or BI/IT Manager – in this fast-paced, rapidly evolving world of big data, data blending and storytelling through powerful visualisation.

We can empower your business influencers and decision makers with rich functionality to detect patterns, trends and business metrics which otherwise would have lain undiscovered in the depths of your corporate data lakes.

We will coach and facilitate your business users to play and discover, to work creatively in order to present data in engaging ways for their audience, and most importantly,  help them excavate and reap tangible business value from their data. If sight is our most efficient human sense (capable of interpreting visual information at network speeds), then business information presented in visually impacting formats must surely be a winning formula for ensuring corporate performance is monitored, managed and acted upon for optimal business benefit. If you would like to get the benefit out of exploring your data, contact us and we will show you how to do it.