In a world where data has become a basic requirement for any planning and strategy building endeavor, visual analytics has emerged as a vital tool for policy makers across various industry verticals. One major challenge as well as for various organizations is finding a way to support decision-making processes with the best techniques and technologies in order to provide better products and services, win the loyalty of their customers, and get an edge over the competitors. By synergizing scientific visualization with information visualization, visual analytics provide analytical reasoning through interactive visual interfaces. Not only is this form of data analysis easier for non-technical users, it also helps professionals identify patterns, trends, and relationships in data. Therefore, analysts at Technavio predict the global market for visual analytics to grow significantly in the upcoming years, registering a CAGR of more than 22% by 2020.
Primary end-users of visual analytics
Regarded as a major innovation in business analytics and business intelligence initiatives, visual analytics is immensely useful in BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), the healthcare sector, the manufacturing industry, IT and telecommunications, and several other industry verticals. In 2015, the most prominent user of visual analytics was the consumer packaged goods and retail sector, followed by BFSI and the healthcare sector.
Global Visual Market By End-user 2015 (% share)
Source: Technavio
The key reason behind the usage of visual analytics is the fact that the above-mentioned industries deal with large volumes of multi-structured data. By integrating new computational and theory-based tools, visual analytics serve as a scoreboard based on which effective presentation features, enhanced consumer-related services, decision-making, and better ROI can be achieved. Due to these advantages, other industries that are in the process of adopting visual analytics systems include IT, telecommunications, media and entertainment, oil and gas, government, education, and transportation.
The UN’s humanitarian efforts and the use of visual analytics
With the idea that understanding data is the key to making actionable decisions, the United Nations (UN) has turned to visual analytics to leverage their humanitarian efforts across the globe. By entering into a strategic partnership with Qlik, a visual analytics provider, the UN plans to create apps capable of analyzing its large database and providing meaningful insight. Governments, regions, and people in need can then use this insight in order to take better, more effective action.
The partnership between the UN and Qlik is very useful for a number of the UN’s initiatives. For example: in the case of sustainable development goals, visual analytics can use the massive amount of data available within the UN to identify and track barriers, improvements, and the overall well-being of the population. Likewise, the data on the minimum set of gender indicators can effectively be used to measure the differences in the social and economic status between women and men.
The primary idea behind visual analytics isn’t just to understand the enormity of the data collected by the UN and related international bodies, but to use this data as a tool to assist people and governments in establishing practical plans. By unlocking the power of data and data analytics tools, the UN is taking a positive step towards using technology as a means to understand the changing global socio-economic dynamics.
Apart from Qlik, other major providers of visual analytics services include Tableau Software, SAS Institute, SAP and Microsoft.
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