How businesses can benefit from visual analytics

Enterprises seek innovative techniques that help them draw attention to key messages and allow them make informed business decisions in complex situations. Visual analytics is one such method that allows decision makers to gain insight into complex problems. It simplifies data values, makes it easy to understand and helps enterprises in communicating important messages and insights which otherwise would be difficult to understand without deep technical expertise.

The practice of presenting information visually is nothing new and the industry has witnessed a growing progression in the techniques down the years; starting with hand-drawn simple charts and tables followed by spreadsheets giving rise to graphs such as bar graphs, pie charts, and line graphs.

Visual analytics uses data visualization techniques like 3-D scatter plots, network graph, interactive bar graph, animated sequence assembly etc. It runs on a code which in turn can be compiled into any programming software platform. It can be used across any industry as it helps capture the changes in a business environment in real time, and facilitates top management to take the best suited business decision.

For instance, insurance industry offers usage-based vehicle insurance, alternatively called pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) insurance to its customers. The insurance value is determined based on type of vehicle used, distance covered, vehicle braking pattern etc. Volumes of such data are collated and stored through telematics tracking device. However, insurance carriers find it challenging to exploit the data in analyzing and rolling out suitable premiums across all sections of their customers. As a result, this allows them to operate at sub-optimal level. Visual analytics can be employed to address the aforementioned challenge.

For a selected geographic category, provision can be made to show a map with bubbles for each customer segmentation. The map can be further zoomed in to multiple sub-layers to study the relation between two parameters and seek correlations in real time. For instance, carriers can define the premium comparing parameters such as the age of the insured, gender, profession, type of road driven, average miles driven per year, probability of accident etc. This helps carriers to price their products and charge different sections of their customers accordingly.

Many banks and financial institutions face challenges to understand the relationship dynamics of their existing portfolios and holding companies. It is crucial for a bank’s CFO to have relevant and timely information at his fingertips to audit them to evaluate associated risks and observe emerging patterns. Conventional business intelligence solutions may not enable financial institutions to drill down to specifics in real time for making better business decisions. For instance, it may be a challenge for some financial institutions to segregate and analyze by their asset class, fund type, client portfolio, fund manager performance, fund level etc., in real time.

The visual analytics model has the provision to aggregate, reconcile and clean data from multiple data sources. As ‘one version of truth’ is readily available for banks and FIs, the models facilitates them to respond to rapidly changing demands and take suitable business actions.

Similarly, in pharma industries visual analytics can be used to compare gene sequence from multiple patients in real time. This helps the pharma companies to analyze new trends, and take suitable decisions on trials. Further, it helps them modify their research methodologies as per the results and hence provides an opportunity to roll out their drugs faster to the market.

In essence, organizations can leverage visual analytics to exploit its home-grown data, analyze it and take informed business decisions to achieve growth and agility. Employing it can catapult organizations ahead of the game rather than chase behind a trend.

This article is published in collaboration with TCS. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: ahul Raj is a part of Analytics and Insights marketing team in Tata Consultancy Services. 

Image: An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a laptop computer, in an office. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel