How can data visualization improve process optimization in your business?

Now, let’s keep it 100—data visualization is the cheat code here. You got data sets bigger than Biggie and Pac’s discography, and you need a way to make sense of that. Data visualization is like your business’s personal translator, breaking down the complex language of numbers into something your whole squad can understand. Think of it like a DJ cutting through the noise to drop the beat everyone can groove to. You want your decisions to be based on some rock-solid insights, not just gut feelings and the phase of the moon. Data visualization helps you see the game for what it is, so you can play to win. Get your numbers up, and watch how fast the rest follows. Keep hustlin’!

Working in the process/workflow domain for the Enterprise, I know that analyzing process data in an enterprise-wide platform is a big deal. With digital transformation, big customers increasingly tend to consolidate on a few leading outlets, including ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce, and Workday. However, they have custom or point solutions. That provides a very diversified landscape and the need to analyze vast information where critical insight may be hidden. This is where visualization becomes fundamental. I want to distinguish between dynamics and navigable visualization vs. static reporting, although the line may be blurry.

When your data’s looking like a Jackson Pollock painting, good luck making any sense out of it. But bring in that data visualization, and it’s like flipping on the lights in a dark room. All of a sudden, you’re spotting trends and patterns like you’ve got the cheat sheet to the game. Now, don’t sleep on the collab aspect, either. You’ve got stakeholders, team members, and departments all lookin’ at the same numbers but from different angles. Data visualization levels the playing field. It’s the universal language that says, “Hey, look here, this is what’s poppin’.” No more he-said, she-said; everyone’s on the same page. Keep that visual game strong, and watch how it elevates your whole operation.

Data visualizations come with the opportunity to consolidate a large amount of information in one single screen. This becomes especially true when interactive visualizations allow one to zoom in and out with simple user controls. Graphs, for example, can rely on the information about how entities are connected and allow to slice and dice that information to gain critical insights. Elements like the node's dimension and the link's thickness can rely on information about the number of executions or the flow of data. The fact that visualizations can be navigated through space and time, annotated, and shared acts as a multiplier for the analysts' efforts and allows them to create journeys through the data.

There is plenty of technology out there to create reports and visualization. Every mature enterprise platform provides its capabilities to create charts and dashboards. More complex visualizations may come with dedicated solutions that need to capture the data through an integration or an ETL process. In the programming space, I've been working with Javascript/D3.js for long enough to know that anything is possible but comes with an extra price in terms of development and maintenance of the code. Besides those technicalities, we encourage the users to educate themselves on visualization best practices and storytelling because these skills will help you identify the best option for your data and relay your message effectively.

Do not overload your dashboards/slides/reports. Data must speak clearle from the first sight. It must convey the message, rarther than confuse the audience. For example, if you want to say that your team have resolved 4000 cases this month - use a single digit visualization and just add the clarification - 4000 cases resolved in <Month>. Simplicity is the key here. Data visualization is like a joke - if you need to explain it, then it is not very good.