Four Things Every Business Should Consider When Evaluating Data Visualization Software

In today’s slow economy, maximizing customer growth, increasing operating performance, and maintaining top-line revenue is imperative for any business looking to maintain or expand market share. That’s why many companies are turning to data visualization software to enhance their analytical capabilities and provide data models that are easily understandable to both end users and analysts. The best software provides data that can be read across platforms and in multiple formats to reduce cost (and risk of data corruption). Most businesses find that this type of software enables them to solve the most complex business problems that contribute to maximizing revenue across the entire business flow; minimize business risk; and contribute to a more satisfying customer experience. Ultimately, data visualization allows end users to quickly understand and correlate data to determine potential problem areas and their solutions. When choosing a data visualization program for your business, focus on the following four areas to get the best fit for your organization.

scalability

Choose software that gives you the processing power you need. Do you have an individual analyst looking at your business process? Then you may just need independent access to the data, in which case a system that processes fewer than 20 million records per day will give you plenty of power. Larger organizations with more than 20 million records, or records up to billions of records per day, will require at least server-level processing power to perform analysis on a larger scale.

Collaboration

For true functionality across all business flows, choose visualization software that allows end users to collaborate with each other to set up graphs and charts on a shared data set. This reduces the need for prior analysis data consolidation and minimizes corporate reliance on IT, providing cost savings and protection against data corruption.

Extended data acquisition

Large corporations in particular may be using COBOL programming or the ASN.1 language, which provides a common syntax for different data. Both systems will require specialized software to achieve accurate recovery of this type of complex data. Not all data visualization programs can achieve this, so if you are using this type of programming, you need to ensure that your chosen software can handle it.

ad hoc vs. automated controls

Smaller businesses will be able to get by with simple ad-hoc controls, but larger (or growing) businesses will want to ensure that their display program has the ability to seamlessly transition from ad-hoc to fully automated controls. within the original environment for profitability and precision.