While data can be an invaluable resource for businesses looking to make better and smarter choices, it can be complex, too. That’s why one of the most important concepts for businesses to understand and use is data contextualization. With the help of data contextualization, you can analyze big data easily to identify patterns, trends, correlations, and gain valuable insights from the data you’ve collected.  

If your business is looking to better understand what your data is telling you, keep reading to learn more about data contextualization and how it can get you from data to insights in no time. 

What is contextualization?

According to the proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, context is information about a certain entity that can be used to reduce the amount of reasoning required for decision-making that’s within the scope of a specific application.

When applied to data analysis, contextualization helps to identify relevant information that can help determine patterns, trends, and correlations. With this data integration, you can provide context to users allowing for better interpretation of your data and enabling you to make smarter decisions.

What is big data?

Big data is a field that treats ways to analyze, systematically extract information from, or otherwise deal with data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software. 

Though data with many categories or columns offer huge statistical power, it could still lead to a high false discovery rate. With that, big data challenges may include data storage, capturing data, search, sharing, querying, transfer, data source, and more. Seeing as it’s a complex concept, working with big data analytics to reduce the obstacles in obtaining data is vital.

The power of data contextualization

Adding context to data means including background information, patterns, trends, outliers, and more, to help a reader make sense of what the data is really saying. For example, in the retail industry, a reported drop in sales during a given month is not valuable without considering things like traffic patterns, previous benchmarks, holidays, and more. Once you have all of that information, a story begins to emerge. It could be that the drop in sales happened over a holiday weekend when most customers go out of town, and isn’t anything to worry about. Or it could be a troubling trend that requires attention. 

More generally, when data is properly contextualized, businesses can use it to guide customer relationships, improve marketing strategies, predict future economic trends, and manage risk.

From there, you can employ data storytelling to create a story from the data analysis you’ve obtained. This allows people to understand complex information and use it to make decisions and take actions against issues. This is incredibly important for influential communications, as narratives and visuals are an effective medium that allows our brain to understand information better, remember it, and make informed decisions.

The Bottom Line: Big Decisions Require Big Data Contextualization 

When it comes to expansion and taking your business to another level, it’s incredibly important to include big data analysis and contextualization into your efforts. With a better understanding of data – such as what it is and how contextualization can make it actionable, you can create impactful strategies and take the right steps to help your company grow and motivate your employees.

Knowing the basics should help you make better decisions in the future, though working with big data analytics companies like Gemini Data is key for accurate, effective, and strategic data analysis.

If you’re interested in learning more about data contextualization and how it can help your business, reach out to us today. We help organizations construct a connected view of their business and can help solve your biggest data challenges, enabling you to understand and share data stories.

Effective storytelling takes time, patience, and practice but when used well, it can add a number of benefits to your business and brand. The benefits of effective business storytelling are so broad that it can be applied across an enterprise, from marketing to recruitment to management, and more. Additionally, the principles and tools of storytelling can be learned by individuals across your organization, from interns to the C suite, which can help build a culture of storytelling – irrevocably changing your business for the better. 

Keep reading to learn just a few of the ways in which storytelling can benefit your organization.

Boost productivity and morale 

In the last ten years, various studies and polls have demonstrated that workers, ranging in age from mid-20s to 40, deeply value purpose in their work. A culture of storytelling can build a solid foundation where people intuitively and easily understand the mission, goals, and strategies of the organization, and most importantly, how they fit into and contribute to them. By transforming buzzwords and numbers into a narrative of the journey of your business, your employees will feel more connected to the business and their jobs, which can lead to improved motivation, work outputs, and productivity. 

Additionally, employees that are engaged and feel they are part of something bigger than them are more likely to be happy at their job, and more happiness at work means better retention, which can save your business a lot of money. 

Encourage friendship and connection

While most people work to support themselves and their loved ones, there is still a desire for human connection in the workplace. An Olivet Nazarene University survey revealed that not only do most of us form friendships at work, but employees who are 40+ want to find more friends at work. 

Leaders would be well-served to encourage connection and relationship-building among their teams to foster greater collaboration and deeper trust. Just as a culture of storytelling can bring an entire organization together, it can gel individual teams as well. Having a firm understanding of what everyone is working toward can lead to greater productivity, achievement of more ambitious goals, and trust and confidence in each other.

Reduce complexity and confusion

A cohesive storytelling strategy can help everyone in an organization cut down on misinterpretation, confusion, and inaccuracies. Reality can be complex, and this includes the latest sales report. An 80-slide presentation on the report will not be memorable or hold anyone’s attention for very long. Additionally, with that much information, there is room for interpretation which can lead to different conclusions, some of which may be inaccurate. A data story which can be retold will bring the most reliable data to those stakeholders who are using them to make important business decisions. 

Conclusion

As the saying goes, teamwork makes the dream work, so teams that truly understand your business can collaborate better to achieve desired goals and improve outcomes. Stories are what resonate with humans – not reams of numbers and data. Even data collection can be delivered in a way that has a captivating beginning, middle, and end to provide a deeper context that can help people make insightful decisions. By leveraging storytelling, your business can see improved productivity, foster friendships in the workplace, and simplify processes. 

If your business wants to tell better stories, reach out to Gemini Data today. We help organizations construct a connected view of their business to transform data into stories. While traditional data analytics solutions tend to be static and tabular, failing to capture the evolution of complex data relationships, we help you connect the dots between data from disparate sources to get to insights faster. 

Given that fact, it’s a no-brainer that businesses should embrace data, but that’s the only first step. The next, and arguably one of the most important, steps is understanding that data and gaining actionable insights. And to do either of those things effectively, data contextualization is key. In this article we’ll explore how contextualization can be a critical element in your business’s strategy and help shape future success.

Do you know what your data is telling you?

To be helpful, data must tell a story that helps stakeholders understand successes, challenges, future trends, and pain points, and helps them make smarter decisions. But reports and numbers on their own don’t help – the information needs to be presented in a compelling and digestible way. Traditional data analytics can be static and tabular, failing to capture the evolution of complex data relationships. That’s where contextualization comes in. With Gemini, you can connect the dots between data from disparate sources and transform data into stories and gain richer insights. 

By definition, “contextualization” means adding related information to something to make it more useful. This can mean including background information, patterns, trends, outliers, and more to help a reader make sense of what the data is really saying. For example, in the retail industry, a reported drop in sales during a given month is not valuable without considering things like traffic patterns, previous benchmarks, holidays, etc. Once you have all of that information, a story begins to emerge. It could be that the drop in sales happened over a holiday weekend when most customers go out of town, and isn’t anything to worry about. Or it could be a troubling trend that requires attention. More generally, when data is properly contextualized, businesses can use it to guide customer relationships, improve marketing strategies, predict future economic trends, and manage potential risk. 

Leverage data stories to enhance productivity

There are many ways in which data and data storytelling can benefit a business, but one that has overarching implications is contextualizing data to boost productivity. When armed with data – and meaningful insights – businesses can create higher performing teams which lead to better outcomes overall.  

When business leaders have real-time, contextualized data, they can be more effective and make good decisions for their team and the company. They can guide their teams in the right direction, create happy and healthy work environments, and boost staff morale – all of which has positive impacts on the bottom line. But just gathering vast amounts of data and randomly sifting through it will not add value to you, your team, or the business. In fact, it could be detrimental as you lost valuable time to an ineffective task. Instead, managers can create value by identifying the right data and generating useful insights. 

Better data = better outcomes

Once you’re sure you’re measuring and collecting information on the right things, you can apply that information to move the business forward. Contextualized data can help leaders within an organization get better at their jobs by identifying opportunities, forecasting trends, and spotting red flags. When managers have a firm grasp of their team’s activities and outputs, they have a full picture of how they’re driving results and meeting goals (or not). In doing that, they can also provide their team with real-time, evidence-based feedback that supports them and ensures success. With a bird’s eye view of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly activities, leaders can make more informed decisions and tweak current strategies to get more desirable outcomes. 

For example, if a manager sees that Production Team A is consistently missing a specific deadline, data contextualization can help them identify the cause and make adjustments to fix it. Without that data, or an understanding of what it’s saying, the problem could continue for years without resolution. Humans are complex beings and there are often many factors influencing outcomes so it’s important for leaders to have the full picture.

Data can be used to inform and influence many areas that affect team productivity, including:

• Cloud-based apps: many organizations offer their employees platforms for communication and collaboration and ensuring that everyone is using them consistently can create efficiencies in process, reporting, and performance. 
• Employee retention: the ability to predict when a team member may leave the organization can have far-reaching effects, influence process improvements, and help reallocate tasks and projects.
• Employee experience: knowing what makes a team happier often leads to higher productivity. Whether it’s working remotely, offering childcare, or team building experiences, gathering and understanding this data allows leaders to identify and track what works and what doesn’t.

Conclusion

Data storytelling will continue to have an impactful role in the business world, and most importantly, contextualizing this data will allow companies to make smarter decisions and maximize outcomes. Understanding what data is saying and using that information to increase productivity is just one way that contextualization can help shape the future of business. 

Thankfully, you don’t have to be a data expert to interpret and dissect valuable data for your business. At Gemini Data, we help  businesses optimize their processes through powerful data visualization techniques. Our advanced analytics solutions will make it easier to compare trends and visualize projections. Schedule a call or start your free trial of Gemini Explore today, and we’ll provide the right analytics solutions for you!

By now, most people have heard the term “big data,” and are aware of the impact it has had across almost every industry. Today, big data’s usage has extended beyond the tech industry to include healthcare, education, governance, retail, and manufacturing, just to name a few. Just about every enterprise and organization is already leveraging the benefits of big data, particularly to inform data-driven decision making. In fact, according to Statista, the global big data market will grow to $103 billion by 2027, and in 2018, nearly 45% of professionals in the market research industry used big data analytics as a research method. 

But fully leveraging the benefits of big data requires powerful analysis and interpretation. If you’re curious to see how your business could leverage the many advantages of big data, keep reading as we dive into just a few of the benefits of big data analytics tools.

What is Big Data Analytics?

Before we talk about the advantages, it’s important to have a clear understanding of big data and their analysis. According to Gartner, “Big Data are high volume, high velocity, and/or high-variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery, and process optimization.” Essentially, big data deals with  datasets that are too large or complex for traditional data processing applications. Big data analytics is the process of analyzing and examining that data on a large scale. 

Big data analytics can reveal hidden patterns and help stakeholders discover correlations and acquire important insights that could help them pivot their business in the right direction.

How Does Big Data Analytics Benefit Companies?

For businesses that learn to use them correctly, big data can help create breakthroughs and empower organizations to work in ways that improve outcomes. Here, we’ll dive into just a few of the benefits of big data analytics. 

• Increased customer acquisition and retention

Whether a multinational firm or a brand-new business, the most important asset to any business is its customers. Regardless of the industry or business model, every company aims to establish a solid customer base, which is an indispensable ingredient for success. Big data tools can help businesses gather large amounts of customer data, which when analyzed and interpreted, can reveal patterns and trends such as customer taste and preferences, pain points, buying behavior, etc., allowing companies to create personalized products/services. As a result, businesses can better deliver exactly what their customers want, making it easier to attract and retain them and increase brand loyalty.

• Improved innovation

The insights gleaned from the analysis of big data can be used to inform and influence business decisions. Additionally, these insights can lead to new ways of thinking which are key to innovation. The insights you gain can be used to develop new products or services to address specific customer challenges, optimize customer service, improve marketing strategies, or find unique ways to grow a brand.  

• Identification of potential risks   

With the disruption of just about every industry, taking more and more risks has become standard operating procedure for many businesses. In fact, many businesses are thriving in a high-risk environment, which requires a risk management strategy. Big data has proven to be instrumental in helping businesses develop new risk management solutions. Amassing large amounts of data on specific risks a business faces is just the first step and can shape and improve the effectiveness of risk management models and create smarter strategies. From there, the analysis of this data can help a business see patterns and trends that might lead to risky scenarios, allowing them to course correct or prepare to take on the risk.

Conclusion 

Big data has emerged as a powerful tool for businesses and opened up new worlds of possibilities. Increased customer retention and acquisition, better innovation, and identification of risks are just a few of the advantages big data analytics can offer. Stay tuned for part two of this blog as we dive into additional benefits that businesses can leverage.  

If your business is looking to better understand and leverage its data, reach out to Gemini Data. We can help you transform data and analytics by enabling you to easily and intuitively interact with data using storytelling visualization. We know how to create a narrative from massive amounts of data, giving you the context and commentary you need to appreciate an insight and integrate it into your business strategy. 

Data analytics and visualization have become critical elements to most businesses across many sectors. These tools allow them to better interpret, analyze, and draw conclusions from data, especially statistical data that can be confusing or overwhelming to anyone who isn’t a data scientist. When organizations want to monitor their performance in real-time, they turn to data visualization to help them translate those large numbers into something that makes more sense and can help them make informed decisions that drive the business forward.

While most types of businesses can benefit from some kind of data analytics and visualization, there are a few industries for whom data is their bread and butter. Without data, these industries would struggle to keep customers happy, meet their goals, and in some cases, keep their business functioning.

If your business is unsure about diving into the world of data, keep reading to see if your industry is one that can most benefit from data analytics and visualization.

1. Transportation and Logistics

The transportation and logistics industry is made up of a series of networks that connect different companies, entities, and organizations that may be geographically disconnected. Think package delivery systems that deliver around the world and have to be in constant communication to ensure timely and accurate delivery. Keeping a network like that up and running can be a daunting task and requires keen monitoring, constant upkeep, and effective optimization to prevent roadblocks and accidents on the road, and miscommunications in the warehouse.

This is where data comes in. Collecting and analyzing data can help businesses understand where bottlenecks are occurring and where things are running smoothly. A clear understanding of this data from visualization can help stakeholders make well-informed choices on how to re-route drivers or pilots and where confusion may lie at the warehouse. Data visualization tools also make servicing vehicle fleets more efficient by displaying real-time information and presenting realistic solutions.

2. Healthcare

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, data visualization tools have been a massive help to many professionals in the healthcare industry. Charts and figures have provided healthcare professionals with real-time information on COVID hotspots and superspreader events that allow them to anticipate and prepare for a wave of new patients.

Public health officials are also able to do their job better when armed with data about the state of public health through geographic information systems, allowing them to alert the public to possible outbreaks. Additionally, with this information they can re-route patients to better-staffed hospitals, keeping overcrowding down.

Data is a critical tool for the healthcare industry even beyond pandemics. It’s crucial for this industry to understand trends and patterns among its patients to create smarter and more effective treatment plans or understand why a group of people are experiencing certain heath issues.

3. Environmental

The environmental sector has relied heavily on geographic information system models and maps for decades. This industry offers one of the best examples of the use of data visualization and has served as a backbone of action schemes and risk reduction strategies for environmental groups. For example, we’ve all seen maps of severe weather patterns and been able to take action to keep ourselves safe. Without that data, we’d be unprepared for severe weather events, resulting in even more damage and potential loss of life. Data analytics and visualizations also give the environmental industry the ability to prevent dangerous situations from happening, or evacuate people from a danger zone.

Environmental professionals also use data visualization techniques and data insight solutions to harness information to create a stable solution for their projects. For example, farmers can benefit from data collection and visualization to monitor their farms and understand the state of their crops.

4. Retail

Companies in the retail sector all use data visualization tools quite extensively. Data visualization and analytics are now used at just about every stage of the retail process, from predicting trends to optimizing pricing to understanding customer behavior to figuring out what to sell next, data has become a critical tool for retail businesses.

Before these tools were available, business owners had to guess or go off old information to understand what products might be popular or why sales were slowing down. But with data tools, they can now forecast trends to ensure they stock the most popular products and plan ahead for slower sales periods. These tools have allowed businesses to thrive and stay competitive in a whole new way.

5. Public Sector

The public sector can benefit from data tools in a myriad of ways, including identifying wasteful spending, tracking population changes, monitoring employment rates, and ensuring accountability in spending money. The public sector has the ability to collect data from so many sources such as census reports, surveys, and utility usage, just to name a few. They can also engage the public in town hall meetings to understand what the community needs.

But, with all of this information coming from multiple sources, it can be challenging to make heads or tails of it, which is where data visualization can help. Having a clear understanding of  what the data is saying can help public officials make well-informed decisions that truly benefit the community and ensure that public money is being spent effectively. It can also help identify and cut down on abuse, fraud, and waste, all of which can put a strain on already scarce resources and erode the public’s trust. With the real-time information data analytic tools provide, the public sector can operate more efficiently and reduce future risks.

Conclusion

Big data is something that will only continue to grow in its importance to businesses, and in the future we’ll see more and more industries relying on it. But we also know that there are some industries that simply can’t function without it, like the ones we talked about here. By leveraging data visualization tools, these industries can overcome their challenges and translate their data into actionable results.

Is your business in one of these industries that needs data analytics and visualization help? Gemini Enterprise transforms data and analytics by enabling you to easily and intuitively interact with data by telling a story. Through our data solutions, we use visualization to make it easy for everyone to understand and digest what story the data is telling us. For more advanced analytics solutions, contact us today.

The old way of looking at data

Many people still remember stories from childhood. Fables and parables with their colorful characters and settings taught lessons about crying wolf or disobeying parents. We remember the plot of movies and the books we’ve read. We entertain and educate each other with yarns of prior exploits and experiences. So why don’t we tell data stories?

The traditional way to look at data is with tables and charts. In many cases, this is fine – especially for comparing values or understanding distributions. But what if you want to make that data memorable?

It’s story time

Why do we tell stories and why are they memorable? First, stories create connections. These connections can be between people or concepts and/or ideas. They allow us to convey an event in history or a character in a situation. When we hear a story, our brain wants to map the action to something that already exists in our memory. We can take advantage of how our brains engage with stories to make data come to life.

Let’s look at a business story that we want to share. It’s the story of a sales team and their performance over the previous quarter. Most of us have seen this type of report, or something similar. For an example, let’s consider a table from a report delivered at the quarterly sales review meeting:

This table is factual and conveys the data we are trying to share, but will any of this be memorable? A reasonably attentive attendee may come away from the presentation with an understanding that things are all pretty good, and maybe the USA region needs some improvement to achieve parity with the other regions, and may be impressed with all those new customer touches.

To highlight aspects of the data, it’s common to expose certain ratios as a chart. Doing so in this case exposes the fact that looking at ‘new customer meetings’ between the USA and EMEA is not as staggeringly different as it seems in the table if you consider the number of Sales Reps in each region.

But what if we wanted to go deeper? A BI tool (or some fancy spreadsheet pivots) would allow an analyst to drill deeper into the data. A common sales manager scenario would be to start looking into the performance of successful (and not so successful) sales reps to see if patterns emerged. Finding and recognizing patterns is a great way to start thinking about stories.  Drilling down on the data, we may see something similar to the following:

The problem with bringing data into a BI tool is that we actually go back to square one when it comes to memorability. Sure, the data is all there, but it exists as columnar tables. An analyst could start building some fancy graphics for this table, but often we find that pie, line, and bar charts start losing their effectiveness with summarized data.

What is still lacking in this type of analysis is visual simplification. The goal is not only to tell a story, but for someone looking at the data to see that story as well.

Here is where graphical analysis comes in. Rather than simply spitting out numbers and tables, graphical analysis allows someone to see data objects and relationships. For example, if we want to see a sales rep’s relationship to an account, we could draw a simple graph:

This is already feeling more like a story. We have a character (Joe, the Sales Rep) who owns an account called Acme Co. Presenting this data graphically allows any reader to understand the relationship without having any knowledge of the original data source or doing any mental mathematics or external table references.

Our story becomes even more complete with the addition of all of Sales Rep Joe’s accounts and opportunities. We will further enrich the graphic by adding object properties such as Opportunity Size and Sales Rep Quota Percentage. A note about object properties – these allow us to add color and detail to a story. The goal in visual storytelling is always to add as much detail as possible without overwhelming the eye or confusing the user.

The story is now taking shape. Knowing that this data represents the prior sales quarter, we know that Sales Rep Joe was working on a handful of opportunities that had emerged from several of his accounts. In fact, one customer, Acme Co, had two different opportunities come to light this quarter. Thanks to the object properties, we can see Joe’s overall progress to his sales goal (percentage wise) and the size in dollars of each opportunity.

Let’s take this one step further to complete a story that we can share with the entire sales team. This time we’ll create some objects based on the grouping of a different property, the Opportunity Status. Grouped objects go a long way in the simplification of the overall data story. Enhancing the data with a grouped property (such as the grouped count here) maintains visual simplicity and provides more detail than forcing a viewer to do the counts themselves. An interactive visual analysis will provide additional detail or viewer drill down.

But what about the story? We’ve got Sales Rep, Joe, who in the current quarter has attained 95% of his assigned sales goal. Upon review of the quarter, he’s worked 110 opportunities. He’s closed 25 and is going into the next quarter with 10 still open, which leaves 75 deals lost. This is a great way to describe how having a larger top of funnel deal count increases the chances of sales success.

Storytelling With Data

Telling stories with data is not always the easiest of tasks, but Gemini is working hard to make this functionality more accessible to business professionals. At Gemini, we believe that data stories are the future of analysis and that business users should be able to easily and intuitively interact with data to simplify storytelling.

Storytelling Technology

In Gemini Explore – the storytelling canvas of Gemini Enterprise – we focus on four different aspects of the story:

• Entity extraction. Those objects we’ve been referencing? Those are entities that live in your data. Entities can be users, systems, places, or concepts. Our examples have focused on entities that consist of sales reps, customers, opportunities, and corporate structure.

• Relationships. In the examples above, relationships are defined as “owners of accounts” and “opportunities tied to an account,” but they can be any reference such as logins to a system, processes hosted on an operating system, or events reported by an endpoint protection system.

• The combination of entities and relationships. This is the cornerstone of storytelling, and Gemini’s third aspect. Having the tools to explore the data with point and click ease is crucial for any storytelling analyst.

• Story sharing. Stories are great for uncovering the meaning within a dataset, but they are an effect multiplier when shared with others who may have additional information or interpretations. Within Gemini Explore, you’ll find the ability to share and collaborate on storytelling.

Getting Started

If you want to see how Gemini can help you tell stories with your data, contact us to set up a discussion with our data professionals. Visit us at geminidata.com or send an email to contact@geminidata.com to schedule a consultation.