At Numeric our goal for 2015 is to work with all of our clients to find the pivot opportunity in their business. To us, pivot means finding greater value from the analytics work that we do, which can mean reducing costs or increasing revenue or other optimizations that directly impact the business. For many clients, moving from reporting to insights will be the pivot for 2015.
What we see first-hand is that customers are overwhelmed by the amount of data that is collected in different areas of their company and they don’t know exactly what data sources or attributes may be important. Furthermore, they are being asked to make decisions more quickly that can impact the business dramatically. So, the real question is, how do you enable your organization to achieve these actionable insights?
We believe that asking the right questions and having the right tools to support finding the answers is the best starting point to make this shift. What customer data do you have in different tools, databases, repositories, that could add to your customer personalization and segmentation efforts? For example, do you have a Point of Sale (POS) system that could help you tie revenue to website activity? Do you have an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that could be linked with website data to understand what parts of the website are driving visitors to call Customer Care?
If you are looking to combine data sources, typically analysts go one of two directions, they work with what they have, which is Excel or they have more specialized tools, like Tableau. Let’s explore the benefits of data visualization tools that go beyond excel functionality.
Flexible charts: Of course Excel allows you to make charts, but what about when you want to change the data sources or the type of chart you are building, well, you have to start again. Tools like Tableau (Qlikview, SAP Lumira) don’t force you to start from scratch every time you change your approach or inputs. Tableau equips you to create charts quickly and easily – adding data, modifying calculations and changing scenarios on the fly. The result is that you see the implications of your analysis as you go, informing you along the way of what your data reveals. With this capability at hand, seeing your data becomes a fundamental dimension of your analysis, not simply the output.
Dashboards: Yes, you can construct a dashboard in Excel, but most analysts don’t bother, it’s too laborious. Tableau and other tools have the advantage of allowing you to see all your data on one page. All the factors that impact a question can be viewed together. The drag and drop functionality of Tableau enables robust data investigation. Establishing filters and drop downs that are easy to create and navigate makes it easy to interact directly with your information. Not only do the dashboards reveal telling relationships between key analyses, but Tableau lets you drill down in real-time to specific data points and calculations to answer questions that are raised by seeing your information in one place.
Lots of data: One million rows and you have hit a dead-end in Excel. Furthermore, performing multiple calculations means making a pot of coffee while you wait for results. In today’s data paradigm, this is not sufficient. Almost 5 exabytes of data are created each day, and that number is doubling every four years.* Tableau-type tools were built with magnitudes of data as the rule not the exception. In short, they were built to accommodate the massive data troves that most businesses have to handle today. Social media, transaction data, customer records and web analytics are just a few examples of the mushrooming data that push beyond Excel’s capacity limits every day.
Real-time data exploration: The truth is, as much as we try to account for all the possible inputs we will need and all the questions we will ever want to pose, it’s impossible. You need a model that allows for exploration and not one that expects you to be a mind-reader, already anticipating all future needs. Tableau-like tools are flexible and allow you to change and add inputs with a drag and drop interface.
Maps: Standard functionality in tableau and visualization tools is to view your data on a map – this isn’t available in Excel. Tableau instantly recognizes geographical data. By mapping your data, you’ll reveal patterns – from product profitability to customer penetration and everything in between – to inform your decisions and guide next steps.
So, for clients at a certain point on the maturity curve Excel can fit the bill. It allows you to combine data sources and create charts and graphs that show the data interactions. But for most, as they move deeper into analysis and insights, Tableau and visualization tools like it enable data to be a played with and explored. It is this shift that is fundamental – enabling teams to run scenarios with the push of a button, to explore interactions by joining data sources that may reveal a pattern that is actionable. Unleashing the creativity of analysts and allowing them to not only answer the questions that you have today but to be prepared to quickly answer what emerges tomorrow is a critical differentiator.
*As of 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day, and that number is doubling every 40 months or so. More data cross the internet every second than were stored in the entire internet just 20 years ago. This gives companies an opportunity to work with many petabyes of data in a single data set—and not just from the internet. For instance, it is estimated that Walmart collects more than 2.5 petabytes of data every hour from its customer transactions. A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes, or the equivalent of about 20 million filing cabinets’ worth of text. An exabyte is 1,000 times that amount, or one billion gigabytes.
https://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution/ar
