Effective data visualisation is the key to making informed decisions
Successful business decisions can only be made consistently through data democratisation and a culture of analysis.
Every modern marketer knows that data is the cornerstone of value for successful customer engagement. Data tells us who is engaged and who isn’t; what our customers and prospects are responding to; where our opportunities for growth are; and which risk factors are most important to focus on.
Beyond the marketing sphere, data is essential for the effective management of day-to-day operations, from supply chains to service delivery. Understanding the holistic context of data within an organisation supports value realisation and longevity.
But raw data is often of little use. In today’s world, the overwhelming volume of available data can prevent meaningful analysis from being completed in a timeframe that enables useful decisions to be made. Businesses need a clear line of sight into the performance of their media, marketing, operations and financial performance.
This requires data to be captured, transformed and made available in an accessible way. Establishing a single version of the truth ensures that data is trusted, and that insights can be expedited.
Shortcomings of marketing dashboards
Despite having existed for a long time, the business intelligence (BI) and analytics landscapes are constantly shifting, as are most enterprise software propositions. Just as the iPhone changed the game for mobile phones, new technologies and approaches are pushing the boundaries of what traditional BI functions can deliver. It’s now necessary to enable data-driven decisions in every area of a business: by giving teams as much data as needed in the most accessible way, a culture of consulting data to inform decisions can be embedded as a practice in all areas.
Data visualisation is an essential capability for a highly functioning organisation. However, out of all the businesses currently employing dashboards, many are simply ‘keeping score’. BI and visual analytics is rapidly evolving with shifts to incorporate natural language processing and ‘next best’ recommendations driven by machine learning (see Merkle’s whitepaper, ‘Unlocking natural language querying’s potential to fuel business intelligence through your organisational data culture’).
By developing the capabilities and enablers required to deliver performance dashboards, businesses can deliver significant incremental performance gains throughout the organisation, while at the same time setting out a stall for stability in future growth.
In Merkle’s first whitepaper, ‘Enabling Performance Email at Scale’, we described four capabilities necessary for the activation of performance email. Alongside this, there are three fundamental capabilities necessary to deliver a shift towards the orchestration of customer journeys, which we explored in our second paper, ‘Evolving from Campaigns to Customer Journeys’. Download Merkle’s third paper, ‘Driving performance from dashboards’, where we review the barriers to developing performance dashboards, and the capabilities and enablers to overcome these.