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Unlocking the Power of Data: Transforming Information into Strategic Insights

In today’s business landscape, leaders face an overwhelming amount of information. Without the right tools to interpret it, navigating this data can feel like walking through a maze blindfolded.

However, it doesn't have to be this way. By employing the right strategies and visualizations, businesses can turn data into a goldmine of opportunities, revealing hidden patterns and driving meaningful change.

Why Data Visualization Matters

Static spreadsheets filled with endless rows of data make it difficult to see the big picture. Data visualization transforms complex information into accessible and actionable formats like graphs, charts, maps, and dashboards. These tools highlight variability, illuminate trends, and draw attention to outliers. 

Done right, data visualization:

  • Enhances Cross-Functional Communication: Great data visualizations create a common language between technical and non-technical folks, bridging gaps in understanding and encouraging collaboration across the enterprise.
  • Facilitates Decision Making: When leaders have a clear view of real-time data at their fingertips, they can make more informed decisions much faster, drilling deep into specifics or acting on a new and important insight right away.
  • Promotes Forecasting: Large models can use historical data to predict what might happen in the future, helping companies proactively make changes to get and stay ahead of the competition. As Doug Kachelmuss, Senior Director of Data & AI at Launch, says, “Without data visualization, you’re playing checkers, reacting to changes as they happen. With data visualization, you’re playing chess, strategically picking your next move ahead of time.”
  • Monitors Issues in Real Time: In dynamic environments, such as healthcare or retail, dashboards that update in real-time are critical, enabling quick responses to emerging trends or issues. Maybe your inventory is low, or there’s an operational problem—real-time dashboards keep everyone aware and alert.
  • Increases Engagement and Retention: Visuals are more engaging than plain text or numbers, capturing an audience’s attention and making information more memorable.

But achieving those outcomes is easier said than done—and it’s not just about finding the right data visualization tool. Doug explains, “Buying a tool doesn’t mean you’re data-driven. What it really comes down to is data hygiene, data governance, and data strategy.”

7 Tips for Maximizing the ROI of Data Visualization

1. Articulate Your Goal

It’s easy to get carried away with all the bells and whistles of modern data visualization tools, but the core purpose of data visualization is to drive people to action.

To start off on the right foot, write down what you want users to do when looking at your visualization before you build anything. To stay on track, keep revisiting that goal as you build.

2. Know Your Audience

Tailor your visualizations to your audience's needs, knowledge level, and interests. For instance, a technical team might appreciate detailed and complex visualizations, whereas a high-level executive might prefer simplified, key insights.

You should also consider the context in which someone will use your visualization. Are you creating it for a formal report? Is it supposed to be a real-time dashboard? Maybe it’s going in a public presentation. Keep user experience top of mind as you refine your visualization.

3. Build Trust From the Beginning

Connecting a data visualization tool to a datasource and creating fancy heat maps is easy. What’s hard is figuring out what data to feed into a visualization tool, how to ensure its accuracy over time, and how to define performance metrics in ways that make sense across the business.

That’s where a partner like Launch can help. “If you can’t trust your data, data visualizations are essentially drawings,” says Doug. “At Launch, we help our clients set a data strategy customized to their business. Over time, this builds trust and convinces leadership to make decisions based on visualizations.”

4. Establish Data Governance

A major benefit of data visualization is the potential for greater data democratization. But not everyone needs to be—nor should be—seeing and acting on the same data. Data visualization presents compliance, privacy, and security risks that must be addressed through proper data governance.

There are clever ways to restrict permissions without hampering productivity. If six managers have different levels of authorization, for example, it doesn’t mean you need to create six different dashboards.

With thoughtful data governance, you’d have one dashboard with six different sets of permissions. That way, you’re maintaining security standards without slowing the whole system down.

At Launch, we do this internally. One dashboard represents all sectors, but each sector leader only sees what they need to see to assess their business. Executives, on the other hand, have broader access and can view overall business performance.

5. Stick With Simple Designs

Try to match your visualization to the data you are presenting and your goal for end users. In general, use:

  • Bar charts for comparisons
  • Line charts for trends over time
  • Scatter plots for relationships between variables
  • Stacked bar charts for parts of a whole

Try to eliminate unnecessary elements that do not add value to the visualization, such as excessive gridlines, additional background colors, and overly complex legends. Hone in on the most important information that you want your audience to see as soon as they see your visualization.

Creating enterprise-wide templates is a good way to simplify your designs across the board. Launch’s consulting teams spend a great deal of time standardizing color palettes, schemas, and reporting notifications for their clients because it boosts engagement.

And they also coach clients on design best practices, such as the Z Theorem—in North America, we read everything from left to right, so the most important items should be in the upper left, followed by the upper right, lower left, and then lower right. Little things like this make a big difference in usability.

6. Provide Guidance

While visuals should be relatively easy to digest at first glance, there are some details you need to clarify for your audience, such as:

  • How each metric is calculated
  • Where each data point comes from
  • Any assumptions you made

As Doug puts it, “‘Revenue’ in one corner of the business may have a very different definition in another. Making definitions and calculations transparent makes visualizations more usable.”

For more self-serve or interactive dashboards, consider offering guidance on how to use available features effectively.

7. Test and Iterate

Your visualization may not be perfect the first time around, and that’s okay. Taking a build-and-iterate approach helps you gather feedback and reminds you to return to the action you’re trying to drive at every step.

 At Launch, we typically do mockups first and use a small dataset. That way, we can assess what’s working and what’s not and have a good setup before moving it to a production environment with all the data flowing through it.

3 Examples of Data VisualizationDriving Transformational Change

Ensuring Timely Analytics and Insights For Legal Services

Before working with Launch, a large litigation consulting and support company was struggling with poor data quality, skyrocketing data architecture costs, and highly manual processes. With Launch’s help, the team designed and built a secure, optimized data pipeline that would automate analytics and dashboards that catered to both executive and tactical needs.

First, they implemented a Snowflake data architecture with robust governance best practices. They then weaved in an efficiency-optimized, self-service data model using dbt, and built a suite of actionable and intuitive Sigma Computing dashboards. By taking an iterative approach to building the pipeline and key data visuals, Launch was able to: 

  • Create a single source of truth for company data
  • Automate actionable insights with regularly refreshed dashboards
  • Increase leadership’s visibility into the business with always-on analytics
  •  Enable self-service report creation

Enabling Real-TimeDecision-Making For a Global Software Vendor

One of Launch’s largest software clients was having trouble deriving meaningful insights and analytics out of their substantial data. They were suffering from severe data sprawl, inconsistencies, and high storage costs.

To overcome these challenges, Launch centralized the company’s ETL process and data analysis in Microsoft Fabric and then built powerful, accurate, real-time dashboards in Power BI.

These dashboards:

  • Identified tasks at risk of missing their deadlines
  • Offered various options for slicing and dicing the data
  • Ensured data was always readily available for stakeholder presentation

Team leads used these visuals to measure their progress, predict how the market will change, drive revenue, and work more efficiently toward their future goals.

Powering Environmental Stewardship at a National Utility Company

A national billion-dollar gas and electric utility company faced critical safety concerns due to falling power lines, threatening wildfires and essential services, and reached out to Launch for help. Launch saw this challenge as an excellent opportunity to centralize data management and enhance data usability via Palantir Foundry.

The team got to work integrating the client’s existing data with geospatial analytics, allowing the utility's personnel to visualize and interact with data through comprehensive maps. Data visuals enabled them to:

  • Continuously monitor progress, which drove operational efficiency
  • Surface previously unknown risks, which improved public safety
  • Make real-time decisions, which helped the company respond quickly to any disruptions

And, ultimately, these applications helped the company develop a plan to underground 10,000 miles of power lines by 2030 while ensuring the resilience of power supply to critical services.

Unlock the Full Potential of Data Visualization

Leveraging data visualization effectively can transform raw data into actionable insights, driving informed decision-making and strategic growth. But you can’t unlock these benefits without streamlined, accurate data.

Is your data doing everything it can for your organization? Take the Data Maturity Self-Assessment to find any gaps so you're ready for your next bold move.

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In today’s business landscape, leaders face an overwhelming amount of information. Without the right tools to interpret it, navigating this data can feel like walking through a maze blindfolded.

However, it doesn't have to be this way. By employing the right strategies and visualizations, businesses can turn data into a goldmine of opportunities, revealing hidden patterns and driving meaningful change.

Why Data Visualization Matters

Static spreadsheets filled with endless rows of data make it difficult to see the big picture. Data visualization transforms complex information into accessible and actionable formats like graphs, charts, maps, and dashboards. These tools highlight variability, illuminate trends, and draw attention to outliers. 

Done right, data visualization:

  • Enhances Cross-Functional Communication: Great data visualizations create a common language between technical and non-technical folks, bridging gaps in understanding and encouraging collaboration across the enterprise.
  • Facilitates Decision Making: When leaders have a clear view of real-time data at their fingertips, they can make more informed decisions much faster, drilling deep into specifics or acting on a new and important insight right away.
  • Promotes Forecasting: Large models can use historical data to predict what might happen in the future, helping companies proactively make changes to get and stay ahead of the competition. As Doug Kachelmuss, Senior Director of Data & AI at Launch, says, “Without data visualization, you’re playing checkers, reacting to changes as they happen. With data visualization, you’re playing chess, strategically picking your next move ahead of time.”
  • Monitors Issues in Real Time: In dynamic environments, such as healthcare or retail, dashboards that update in real-time are critical, enabling quick responses to emerging trends or issues. Maybe your inventory is low, or there’s an operational problem—real-time dashboards keep everyone aware and alert.
  • Increases Engagement and Retention: Visuals are more engaging than plain text or numbers, capturing an audience’s attention and making information more memorable.

But achieving those outcomes is easier said than done—and it’s not just about finding the right data visualization tool. Doug explains, “Buying a tool doesn’t mean you’re data-driven. What it really comes down to is data hygiene, data governance, and data strategy.”

7 Tips for Maximizing the ROI of Data Visualization

1. Articulate Your Goal

It’s easy to get carried away with all the bells and whistles of modern data visualization tools, but the core purpose of data visualization is to drive people to action.

To start off on the right foot, write down what you want users to do when looking at your visualization before you build anything. To stay on track, keep revisiting that goal as you build.

2. Know Your Audience

Tailor your visualizations to your audience's needs, knowledge level, and interests. For instance, a technical team might appreciate detailed and complex visualizations, whereas a high-level executive might prefer simplified, key insights.

You should also consider the context in which someone will use your visualization. Are you creating it for a formal report? Is it supposed to be a real-time dashboard? Maybe it’s going in a public presentation. Keep user experience top of mind as you refine your visualization.

3. Build Trust From the Beginning

Connecting a data visualization tool to a datasource and creating fancy heat maps is easy. What’s hard is figuring out what data to feed into a visualization tool, how to ensure its accuracy over time, and how to define performance metrics in ways that make sense across the business.

That’s where a partner like Launch can help. “If you can’t trust your data, data visualizations are essentially drawings,” says Doug. “At Launch, we help our clients set a data strategy customized to their business. Over time, this builds trust and convinces leadership to make decisions based on visualizations.”

4. Establish Data Governance

A major benefit of data visualization is the potential for greater data democratization. But not everyone needs to be—nor should be—seeing and acting on the same data. Data visualization presents compliance, privacy, and security risks that must be addressed through proper data governance.

There are clever ways to restrict permissions without hampering productivity. If six managers have different levels of authorization, for example, it doesn’t mean you need to create six different dashboards.

With thoughtful data governance, you’d have one dashboard with six different sets of permissions. That way, you’re maintaining security standards without slowing the whole system down.

At Launch, we do this internally. One dashboard represents all sectors, but each sector leader only sees what they need to see to assess their business. Executives, on the other hand, have broader access and can view overall business performance.

5. Stick With Simple Designs

Try to match your visualization to the data you are presenting and your goal for end users. In general, use:

  • Bar charts for comparisons
  • Line charts for trends over time
  • Scatter plots for relationships between variables
  • Stacked bar charts for parts of a whole

Try to eliminate unnecessary elements that do not add value to the visualization, such as excessive gridlines, additional background colors, and overly complex legends. Hone in on the most important information that you want your audience to see as soon as they see your visualization.

Creating enterprise-wide templates is a good way to simplify your designs across the board. Launch’s consulting teams spend a great deal of time standardizing color palettes, schemas, and reporting notifications for their clients because it boosts engagement.

And they also coach clients on design best practices, such as the Z Theorem—in North America, we read everything from left to right, so the most important items should be in the upper left, followed by the upper right, lower left, and then lower right. Little things like this make a big difference in usability.

6. Provide Guidance

While visuals should be relatively easy to digest at first glance, there are some details you need to clarify for your audience, such as:

  • How each metric is calculated
  • Where each data point comes from
  • Any assumptions you made

As Doug puts it, “‘Revenue’ in one corner of the business may have a very different definition in another. Making definitions and calculations transparent makes visualizations more usable.”

For more self-serve or interactive dashboards, consider offering guidance on how to use available features effectively.

7. Test and Iterate

Your visualization may not be perfect the first time around, and that’s okay. Taking a build-and-iterate approach helps you gather feedback and reminds you to return to the action you’re trying to drive at every step.

 At Launch, we typically do mockups first and use a small dataset. That way, we can assess what’s working and what’s not and have a good setup before moving it to a production environment with all the data flowing through it.

3 Examples of Data VisualizationDriving Transformational Change

Ensuring Timely Analytics and Insights For Legal Services

Before working with Launch, a large litigation consulting and support company was struggling with poor data quality, skyrocketing data architecture costs, and highly manual processes. With Launch’s help, the team designed and built a secure, optimized data pipeline that would automate analytics and dashboards that catered to both executive and tactical needs.

First, they implemented a Snowflake data architecture with robust governance best practices. They then weaved in an efficiency-optimized, self-service data model using dbt, and built a suite of actionable and intuitive Sigma Computing dashboards. By taking an iterative approach to building the pipeline and key data visuals, Launch was able to: 

  • Create a single source of truth for company data
  • Automate actionable insights with regularly refreshed dashboards
  • Increase leadership’s visibility into the business with always-on analytics
  •  Enable self-service report creation

Enabling Real-TimeDecision-Making For a Global Software Vendor

One of Launch’s largest software clients was having trouble deriving meaningful insights and analytics out of their substantial data. They were suffering from severe data sprawl, inconsistencies, and high storage costs.

To overcome these challenges, Launch centralized the company’s ETL process and data analysis in Microsoft Fabric and then built powerful, accurate, real-time dashboards in Power BI.

These dashboards:

  • Identified tasks at risk of missing their deadlines
  • Offered various options for slicing and dicing the data
  • Ensured data was always readily available for stakeholder presentation

Team leads used these visuals to measure their progress, predict how the market will change, drive revenue, and work more efficiently toward their future goals.

Powering Environmental Stewardship at a National Utility Company

A national billion-dollar gas and electric utility company faced critical safety concerns due to falling power lines, threatening wildfires and essential services, and reached out to Launch for help. Launch saw this challenge as an excellent opportunity to centralize data management and enhance data usability via Palantir Foundry.

The team got to work integrating the client’s existing data with geospatial analytics, allowing the utility's personnel to visualize and interact with data through comprehensive maps. Data visuals enabled them to:

  • Continuously monitor progress, which drove operational efficiency
  • Surface previously unknown risks, which improved public safety
  • Make real-time decisions, which helped the company respond quickly to any disruptions

And, ultimately, these applications helped the company develop a plan to underground 10,000 miles of power lines by 2030 while ensuring the resilience of power supply to critical services.

Unlock the Full Potential of Data Visualization

Leveraging data visualization effectively can transform raw data into actionable insights, driving informed decision-making and strategic growth. But you can’t unlock these benefits without streamlined, accurate data.

Is your data doing everything it can for your organization? Take the Data Maturity Self-Assessment to find any gaps so you're ready for your next bold move.

Back to top

More from
Latest news

Discover latest posts from the NSIDE team.

Recent posts
About
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