A Data Science Central Community
Financial institutions, like many other industries, are grappling with how best to harness and extract value from big data. Enabling users to either “see the story” or “tell their story” is the key to deriving value with data visualization tools, especially as data sets continue to grow.
With terabytes and petabytes of data flooding organizations, legacy architectures and infrastructures are becoming overmatched to store, manage and analyze big data. IT teams are ill-equipped to deal with the rising requests for different types of data, specialized reports for tactical projects and ad hoc analytics. Traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions, where IT presents slices of data that are easier to manage and analyze or creates pre-conceived templates that only accept certain types of data for charting and graphing miss the potential to capture deeper meaning to enable pro-active, or even predictive decisions from big data.
Out of frustration and under pressure to deliver results, user groups increasingly bypass IT. They procure applications or build custom ones without IT’s knowledge. Some go so far as to acquire and provision their own infrastructure to accelerate data collection, processing and analysis. This time-to-market rush creates data silos and potential GRC (governance, regulatory, compliance) risks.
Users accessing cloud-based services – increasingly on devices they own – cannot understand why they face so many hurdles in trying to access corporate data. Mashups with externally sourced data such as social networks, market data websites or SaaS applications is virtually impossible, unless users possess technical skills to integrate different data sources on their own.
Steps to visualize big data success
Architecting from users’ perspective with data visualization tools is imperative for management to visualize big data success through better and faster insights that improve decision outcomes. A key benefit is how these tools change project delivery. Since they allow value to be visualized rapidly through prototypes and test cases, models can be validated at low cost before algorithms are built for production environments. Visualization tools also provide a common language by which IT and business users can communicate.
To help shift the perception of IT from being an inhibiting cost center to a business enabler, it must couple data strategy to corporate strategy. As such, IT needs to provide data in a much more agile way. The following tips can help IT become integral to how their organizations provide users access to big data efficiently without compromising GRC mandates:
Where visualization is heading
Data visualization is evolving from the traditional charts, graphs, heat maps, histograms and scatter plots used to represent numerical values that are then measured against one or more dimensions. With the trend toward hybrid enterprise data structures that mesh traditional structured data usually stored in a data warehouse with unstructured data derived from a wide variety of sources allows measurement against much broader dimensions.
As a result, expect to see greater intelligence in how these tools index results. Also expect to see improved dashboards with game-style graphics. Finally, expect to see more predictive qualities to anticipate user data requests with personalized memory caches to aid performance. This continues to trend toward self-service analytics where users define the parameters of their own inquiries on ever-increasing sources of data.
Great summary of visualization value and trends. Lately, the usual correlation-type plots are going on to predictive modeling, which can be very dangerous without visualizations of signals with simulated noise in input and response factors. The JMP Profilers by SAS are excellent tools for each step in the analysis and modeling chain. Open source tools require major effort by comparison, so simply using R to augment any missing capabilities or visualization styles in JMP has proven helpful with less overall effort.
This mix and match effort keeps the IT people in the loop, but allows engineering customization as needed without "asking permission."
Comment
© 2021 TechTarget, Inc.
Powered by
Badges | Report an Issue | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
Most Popular Content on DSC
To not miss this type of content in the future, subscribe to our newsletter.
Other popular resources
Archives: 2008-2014 | 2015-2016 | 2017-2019 | Book 1 | Book 2 | More
Most popular articles
You need to be a member of BigDataNews to add comments!
Join BigDataNews