Data is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Visualizing Digital Transformation

The right visualization adds color and sizzle to your data analytics, leading to immediate insights and other benefits.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a saying we’ve all heard many times. It applies to situations where engineers want to convey complex ideas that a verbal description can’t effectively communicate. Instead, a still image, a video or a simulation can powerfully explain complicated concepts. This need occurs repeatedly in digital transformation initiatives and routine business processes enhanced through digital transformation.

Data visualization is the technology that enables effective visual communication of digital data. It enhances digital transformation in many ways. For example, data visualizations:

1. Convert dry, intricate data into visually attractive images.
2. Transform boring, monotonous tables into more engaging charts for improved understanding.
3. Make reports absorbable for your audience, regardless of their knowledge of data analytics.

Embedding digital data capture, data analytics and data visualization into core business processes can bring dramatic, immediate benefits.

Enhance the value of data analytics

Data analytics is the science of analyzing curated data to identify insights, draw conclusions and make recommendations for business improvement. Digital transformation enables access to more data analytics for engineers and other professions throughout organizations. However, many organizations struggle to present the results of their data analytics effectively.

The following dashboard illustrates that data visualizations can show data analytics conclusions and recommendations. Each dashboard element shows a specific variable’s key performance indicator or trend.

This example dashboard from Unity illustrates the effectiveness of visualizing many different types of information at one time. (Image: Unity.)

Data visualizations benefit data analytics by:

• Increasing communication clarity and audience impact.
• Showing conclusions and recommendations as charts that are easier to understand than tables of numbers or text.

Enhance the value of IIoT data

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) consists of many connected sensors, actuators and other devices that measure mainly pressure, temperature, and status to control manufacturing and industrial processes. Organizations generate vast volumes of IIoT data due to the growing number of IIoT devices and the short time intervals for which IIoT sensors generate values. Identifying insightful values and trends in this vast volume of IIoT data is difficult for engineers.

Data visualizations can summarize the IIoT data into meaningful charts to illustrate anomalies and trends. Each chart in the dashboard below summarizes tens of thousands of IIoT data points.

This example dashboard from BrainCube illustrates the effectiveness of summarizing and visualizing vast volumes of IIoT data from many sensors. (Image: BrainCube.)

Data visualizations deliver these benefits for IIoT data:

• Enables identifying insightful values and trends.
• Avoids relying on simplistic numeric analysis and display.

Show data quality improvement opportunities

Data quality is a measure of the accuracy and completeness of data. The data quality level in most organizations’ datastores is insufficient to advance digital transformation. This situation can be frustrating for engineers trying to advance digital transformation initiatives.

Data visualizations can powerfully illustrate the state of data quality and show where progress has been achieved and more attention is needed. The visualizations often encourage staff to make improvements.

This example chart from ScienceSoft illustrates the effectiveness of visualizing the status of data quality improvement efforts against targets. (Image: ScienceSoft.)

Data visualizations deliver these benefits for data quality:

• Identify data columns that need more attention.
• Identify which aspects of data quality management need more attention.
• Quickly respond to those who challenge the need to improve data quality.

Monitor cybersecurity defenses

Cybersecurity defenses are the software and processes that prevent unauthorized access and cyberattacks from damaging a computing infrastructure—a looming threat for engineering companies. Digital transformation initiatives often increase cybersecurity risks by increasing the:

• Volume of digital data that is potentially accessible to hackers.
• Number of staff and their devices that have access to digital data.
• Amount of data that staff can access.

The second problem is that the monitoring work of cybersecurity defenses generates vast volumes of data, making identifying suspicious activity and cyberattacks extremely difficult.

Data visualizations can counter these cybersecurity risks by summarizing the monitoring data into meaningful charts to highlight suspicious activity. Each chart in the dashboard below summarizes tens of thousands of monitoring data points.

This example dashboard from Verimatrix illustrates the effectiveness of cybersecurity defenses. (Image: Verimatrix.)

Data visualizations benefit cybersecurity defenses by reducing the:

• Risk of missing an intrusion attempt.
• Elapsed time until the cybersecurity staff responds to an intrusion attempt.

Bring clarity to data pipelines

Data pipelines bring data from disparate data sources, transform it and insert it into data lakehouses and warehouses. Lakehouses and warehouses are datastores that are essential to digital transformation initiatives. Understanding data pipelines’ many steps can be challenging for engineers who lead software development.

Data visualizations can illustrate the process steps of data pipelines and their complex interactions much better than text. Drilling into the high-level diagram below will visualize the details of the data pipeline processes.­

Example diagram from AWS that illustrates the architecture of a data lake centric analytics platform. (Image: AWS.)

Data visualizations deliver these benefits for data pipelines:

• Simplify designs for robustness and improved performance.
• Improve uptime.
• Reduce software maintenance costs.
• Reduce enhancement elapsed times.

Data visualization is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance the value of various aspects of digital transformation initiatives.