Our world is awash in data. It comes at us from all directions and from many sources. From the news, social media, analytics platforms, magazines, books, blogs… the list goes on. For the average person, it can be challenging to parse through everything and decide what to pay attention to. And it’s no different for businesses. But, collecting data and making sense of it is critical to businesses and can help stakeholders make smarter decisions.

Turning raw data into actionable insights is necessary to help businesses understand how to effectively and efficiently use big data, improve business strategies, and stay ahead of the competition. There are many factors and processes that can help, such as filtering, grouping, and segmenting. In this article, we’ll take a look at just a few other tactics that can help your business turn data into actionable information.

Know what to measure

Knowing what to measure is one of the most important things you should do to maximize insights gleaned from your data. After all, you won’t have anything to analyze if you don’t know how or where to look at your data. For example, if you want to better understand an e-commerce site, you would want to check things such as conversation rates, bounce rates, and what channels are driving the most traffic. Knowing what to look for will help you figure out which strategies work and which could use improvement. Understanding what you need to measure will also help you identify patterns and trends.

Identify patterns

Speaking of patterns, these can be critical in turning your data into information. According to WikiPedia, pattern recognition is the “automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data.” It has applications in many areas, including statistical data analysis, signal processing, and more. An example of a pattern could be a significant rise in sales on Saturday afternoons for a retail business. Identifying that pattern can offer ideas on how to maximize those sales by identifying what is causing that spike and how to replicate it. However, be careful when looking for patterns. Not all of them might be applicable to your research or needs and should be reviewed carefully.

Convey your message clearly

Once you have collected your data, you will need to communicate them across your organization or team to understand what they’re telling you. This is an important step in making sure everyone is on the same page and can be helpful in talking through any assumptions or inaccuracies. You’ll want to make sure that you present this information as clearly as possible. Consider visualizing the information to make it more digestible and understandable. For example, if you need to present six month’s worth of sales data, it may be overwhelming – not to mention boring – to present reams of numbers. Instead, break down the information into bite size pieces or visualize them so everyone can go through it together. It’s important to make sure that all stakeholders have a clear understanding of the data to draw the most accurate and helpful conclusions. Also, consider building a story of the what, how, and why behind the data you collected. This can be a good way to make the data memorable and help stakeholders make better decisions.

Understand the context 

Apart from what the data itself may mean, understanding the context behind that data is also vital. This is because everyone has their own assumptions, perspectives, and opinions which could color their interpretation of the data. For example, a 2% conversion rate increase may seem huge for someone coming from a smaller business, but that could be insignificant – or even fall short of goals – for a multimillion dollar company. In other words, data that lacks context can lead to conflicting conclusions, negatively impacting business decisions and strategies moving forward.

Partner with the right people

You can collect all the data in the world, but if you don’t have the right people helping you analyze and understand it, it’s going to be next to impossible to gain any insights. The right partner can guide you in collecting the right data in addition to enabling you to easily and intuitively interact with data. At the end of the day, gaining actionable insights from data is all about helping people learn faster and do their jobs better, which the right partner can help you achieve.

Conclusion

The tactics suggested in this article are just the tip of the iceberg of how your business can learn to gain actionable insights from all the data you’re collecting. Finding a good partner who can guide you on your data analytics journey can be a critical factor in getting your data to work better for you.

If you’re looking for a data analytics company to help you make the most out of your data, contact Gemini today. We can help your business  interact with data through storytelling visualization for more powerful and memorable insights.

Technology has changed the way we interact with data and information across all areas of our lives. With the 24-hour news and social media cycles, we’re inundated with information that can be overwhelming to digest and understand on our own. Fortunately, we now have our choice of powerful tools to collect, store, present, and understand data. Because data can be so powerful, it’s important that end users understand it, and with data analytics and visualization tools, it can be so much easier to identify trends and patterns.

Many sectors are moving toward data-driven decision making and leveraging the power of information. Colleges and universities are no exception and there are many strategies they can employ to make sense of their data. Data visualization is one such tool and it’s been found to improve student success, resource allocation, persistence rates, and more. In fact, effective data analytics software and visualization can help improve a school system overall.

Keep reading to learn more about how data visualization can benefit higher education institutions.

Helping institutional leaders

Leaders are always looking for ways to improve processes and outcomes and will often need to present those findings to stakeholders and decision makers. This is when data visualization can come in handy. It can be a challenge to get everyone involved to see eye-to-eye and agree on a decision, but when you present data in easy-to-digest charts, graphs, and visualizations, you can help improve decision making. Identifying trends and patterns can demonstrate what is going wrong (or right) allowing the end user to understand the current situation and decide on the best path forward. From there, it can be significantly easier to propose changes, adjustments, and improvements to the program for better results.

Ensuring student success

No matter the size of your student body, it can be challenging to collect reliable student data and then understand what to do with that information. However, data visualization tools can help institutions gather and understand valuable information and student perspectives on challenges and opportunities.

Using this information, leaders can improve persistence rates by discovering the root of the problem that is preventing students from staying in school. If you find more and more students discontinuing their education, there is probably a common denominator causing this to happen and it’s important to identify what that is and make adjustments. Chances are that if you look closer, you might find that there is something in your program that you can improve to help students face the challenges that are taking them out of school.

Improving curriculum

The best way to know whether your curriculum is effective or not is through course success rates. Course success rates are defined by any student taking the course and passing with an average or higher score. If you find that a particular class has a high failure rate, you can probably determine the possible source of the problem through these reports.

Through this, you’ll be able to see the commonalities that might have contributed to the low passing rate of a class. It could be that it’s held too early, handled by only one professor, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, you will find it in the data and be able to course correct to improve student success and make your institution’s curriculum top notch.

Tracking resources

Resource allocation is extremely important in higher education. Whether you’re a private or public institution, it’s critical that you’re stewarding funds in the most efficient and responsible manner possible. Wasted resources can put a drain on finances and you don’t want to spend money on things that aren’t working.

Data collection and visualization can help you quickly identify where resources are being wasted and any adjustments you can make to put them to better use. Not only will this help your institution spend smarter, but you’ll get a great reputation as a responsible steward of student tuition and government dollars.

The Bottom Line

Data is powerful, but it alone cannot help institutions make better decisions on how to help students and improve school systems. Leveraging different data visualization strategies can help higher education institutions improve resource allocation and student success and help leaders make smarter decisions.

Big data analytics services can do a lot to help your institution work more efficiently and effectively. Gemini Data provides data availability for AI/ML-driven analysis and applications to enable unified knowledge and access. With our products and solutions, you can make data-driven decisions easier and faster.

Analytics and machine learning used to be just catchy buzzwords tossed around in the business world, but they have entered the mainstream today. Companies now know how valuable data is, which has magnified the importance of implementing data visualization to better understand their meaning. But, it can be confusing and overwhelming to understand how best to leverage data visualization and many companies do it differently. However, there are a few tips that data visualization pros use that can benefit your business. Keep reading for a few best practices for handling, analyzing, and interpreting bulk quantities of information.

Prioritize Your Audience

Data visualization isn’t just about arranging data into charts and dashboards to deliver information. When thinking about data visualization, it’s important to consider specific circumstances, such as what your audience needs to know. When developing a visualization, identify the persona who will be reading the data. Look at their challenges and goals, and identify the roadblocks they face on the way to achieving those. Don’t create a single dashboard for all stakeholders—design it for the people most likely to keep referring to this particular set of data.

You should also know the decisions you hope to drive with the data. For example, operational choices might require different visualizations from strategic or tactical ones. Make sure your method aligns with the data, i.e., time-series data sets require a scale that graphs the data points in time order. Meanwhile, operational decisions may be presented in binaries like “Approve or Deny.” A more complex or interactive dashboard would be suitable for strategic and tactical decisions since there are many factors at play.

What Actions Can Viewers Take Based on the Data?

Besides showing stakeholders trends or patterns, data should enable them to act. For example, you could define a threshold for action. When sales performance falls outside a statistically significant norm, for example, you could start gathering data on why this is the case. It ensures that your visualizations stay relevant and actionable for the organization. A big data company can provide you with insights and actionable reports from the information you generate online.

Choose the Right Visual

As mentioned earlier, some types of data fit certain chart types better than others and can help your audience better understand the information. Some of the most frequently used types of visualizations include:

• Tables: This type consists of rows and columns and can present a lot of information at once. These are good for showing mid-sized trends. High-level views need another type of chart since the amount of data can be overwhelming.

• Line and Area Charts: These visualizations track changes and relationships between two or more variables. Area charts have a shaded portion below the line, which compares changes among data sets.

• Bar Charts: This type puts quantities from different categories together.

• Scatter Plots: This type shows variables plotted along two axes and can reveal correlations among patterns. A subtype of scatter plots includes bubble charts, which show variation between three aspects: the data items on the two axes and the size of the bubble.

• Pie or Donut Charts: These types compare parts of a whole. Be careful when using pie and donut charts; the sizes of wedges can skew people’s perception of the data. This type of visual needs clear labeling and notations.

• Tree Maps: This type is great for comparisons of proportions and area size.

• Heat Maps: This chart represents values as colors and shows the magnitude of a phenomenon. Typically, marketers use them to measure aggregate behavior on websites.

• Natural Language Generation: Also known as NLG, it is a software process that generates text from data input. Chatbots, image captions, and reports are examples of outputs from NLG.

Conclusion

The world is immersed in the information age and those businesses that have a firm grasp on their data are better positioned to steer their organizations to success. Collecting and storing data is just the start—you also need a way to interpret and visualize information to make actionable decisions.

If your business is looking to explore the possibilities of data visualization, partner with Gemini Data. We provide data insight solutions and help organizations measure their success and shape new, exciting ways forward. Contact us today, and let us start telling your story!

The use of data – and understanding its meaning through analytics – has become essential in most industries. For the telecom industry, data can be an invaluable tool to staying ahead in one of the most competitive industries in the world. Telecom businesses can use data analytics to streamline operations, improve processes, track projects, and fix problems. And it can inform decision-making and strategies by providing valuable insights.

Data is powerful in practically every industry today, but when it comes to telecom, there are a few particular key areas in which it shines.

Business Processes

Every department of a telecommunications provider generates a significant amount of data, from customer usage to company insights. However, unless there is uniform data management and analytics, other departments cannot benefit from each other’s insights and use them to make well-informed decisions. Furthermore, data from one department can be in different formats on different platforms, making it difficult to transfer information and holding back improvement in business processes.

Data analysis helps companies in making better decisions by increasing efficiency. It will also speed up commercial processes that cater to consumers. Data that is used can improve any business activity, such as increasing supply chain communication or enhancing the relevance of telecommunication offerings. It also allows stakeholders within the company to better understand what they are doing well and what could be improved.

Decision Making & Troubleshooting

Making decisions that will push a business forward is critical, and while decision makers can rely on guesswork or what has been done in the past, understanding data is a far more reliable way to make strategic choices. For the telecom industry, decisions such as what infrastructure to upgrade or where to send more data should only be made using real-time insights gleaned from data analysis.

Additionally, data can help a business understand where they’re experiencing problems such as outages or slowdowns, how to address problems quickly, and how to prevent future challenges. Investing in world-class data analytics technology can help you stay ahead of the competition, keep customers happy, and minimize problems.

Investment and Expansion

With the almost continuous innovation in digital technologies, expanding and innovating are essential for the telecom industry. For example, if your company is looking to enter a foreign market, there are likely regulations on how you can offer your products and services to consumers. Using data analysis to understand your target audience’s preferences, demographics, and other information could help you streamline where and how you offer your services, setting you up for maximum success while minimizing trial and error.

Having a clear vision of this could help develop the appropriate product that will be critical in your investment and expansion journey. When companies have access to crucial information before making a final choice, growth becomes much less risky. You may also utilize this information to develop an actionable plan.

Better Future and Success

Targeting your company’s relevant consumers with the appropriate mix of products or services can help future-proof your business. Making data-driven marketing decisions can ensure that all of your efforts – from ideation to development to marketing – are moving your business toward success. It will also save you time since you will have to construct strategies to rectify errors and save costs from any misguided marketing efforts.

Final Thoughts

The data-driven discovery of future-oriented learning may help you move your business ahead in the competitive telecommunications industry. Moreover, the role of data analytics can improve the efficiency of your company’s processes while also simplifying day-to-day operations. While it can be challenging to stay innovative in the fast-changing telecom industry, data insight solutions can help manage any challenge in the changing demands of the industry.

Make your business stay resilient amidst challenges by finding the right firm to provide data insight solutions. At Gemini, we provide the best data stories to help you thrive in your industry with useful insights! Learn more and contact us today.