Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

NECESSITY: DON’T BOIL THE OCEAN

The next principle in our CONVINCE Framework for data visualization is Necessity. Here, we mean that you should challenge your team to visualize only data that helps tell the story of the data and ties back to your core business objectives. It’s easy to get lost or even overwhelmed in the data and think everything is important. However, your team must focus and tie back to the original business challenges and questions when constructing data visualizations. You must be a beacon and a continual reminder that in order for your business analytics to be effective, each data visualization must tie back to the business needs and support the critical business questions being asked. Including unnecessary information is especially common among inexperienced analysts, who will often include everything and the kitchen sink when presenting the data.

For example, take Exhibit 6.5. It is a poor and overwhelming word cloud and shows too much information, confusing the observer.5 If you have no idea what a word cloud is, a word cloud represents word usage in a document by resizing words in the document proportionally to how frequently they are used and then assembling them into some sort of an arrangement. This technique was first used online in the 1990s as “tag clouds,” which have been described as “the mullets of the Internet” and were originally used to display the popularity of keywords in bookmarks.6

Exhibit 6.5 Word Cloud

Contrast that to Exhibit 6.6 ...