Bet You’ve Never Seen Your Data Like This…

Data guru David McCandless wows us in Dublin with his interpretations and visual messaging. The key message to take away: Context is crucial You know the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Well here’s an even better one for you: "Designed data sends a stronger message." If you are not quite sure what to make of this, consider the following: conventionally, we are used to sharing information – be it reports or a pitch – via tables, charts and lists. Now imagine if, instead, you could create something that combines the data element with the visual, Designing data as David McCandless does, in strong colors and proportionate to each data set’s value, means you can recognize patterns and relationships immediately, without needing to analyze the information. The design does the analyzing for you. That’s the message David shared with delegates at Shared Services & Outsourcing Week in Dublin, this afternoon. "There are patterns lurking in the data, which you only really see clearly once it’s displayed visually," he explained. Rather than waste words, David shared one of his videos, which you can watch below: How Can "Visual" Help With Shared Services? Today, "data" represents the "big guns" for Shared Services. The conversation here in Dublin – in the halls, over coffee, in the sessions – is all about how to mine, analyze and drive better insights for business decisions based on data. You may think this is nothing new, we’ve always been looking at numbers, after all. But what differentiates this trend in this moment are two things: first, today, it’s about "predictive" as opposed to "historic" analytics – in other words: what should you do based on what is currently happening? And second, context is crucial. Which brings us back to David McCandless. Illustrating beautifully why context matters, and how lack of context can skew results – and lead you to make the wrong decisions – David posted a slide listing the world’s biggest armies, ranked by country. As expected, China led (we already knew that, right?) in terms of absolute military size. BUT (and it’s a crucial "but") if you introduce context – in this case: population size – and focus on army size as a percentage of overall population) something amazing happens: China slips from first place to … 124th! And North Korea ranks first. David describes this as bringing in a new data set to "normalize the data" (or also: "data smackdown"). [eventpdf] Data is, indeed, the new "oil". But in David’s world, data is not a noun but a process. David credits Hans Rosling with having formulated its impact through his famous battle-cry, "Let my data set change your mind set." (Watch his amazing TED talk here.) The message to anyone who is tasked with creating reports that offer the best possible snapshot of your operations, is to combine the powerful "visual language" of the eye with the equally powerful "concept language" of the mind to create visual data reports that immediately highlight not just the status quo but also relationships and trends, as well as cause-and-effect. Visual data does this beautifully. "When you visualize the data, you see relationships that you cannot immediately see in spreadsheets," explains David. "An added benefit is that images tend to lower people’s defenses. Where verbal presentations can be construed as threatening, visual presentations tend to be perceived as neutral." Some final words of wisdom from David: ‘Interesting’ is the mind’s word for beautiful. So our challenge to you: start using visual data reports to get your stakeholders on board, to share business insights with the business units, and to communicate your impact on business outputs. To help you get started, we've listed a few online resources below. Resources to explore: Spotfire Tableau (a show of hands indicated 10% of our audience were already dabbling with this) Birst Datawatch Article: The 36 best tools for data visualization Article: Data Visualization: 20+ Useful Tools And Resources

Bet You’ve Never Seen Your Data Like This…

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