Importance of Data Mining and Visualization Skills

So, you are an entrepreneur.  You deal with numerous challenges every day, and come out victorious with your persistence, hard-work, intelligence, and future-oriented approach.  However, data hasn’t been on the top of your mind.  You might think that data is an extravagance that can be ignored for the time being.  Anyway, you have so much else that you need to care about.  However, this approach might be restricting your company’s growth.  Data isn’t just a luxury that’s meant for enterprises; it is now an essential aspect of any business.  It helps you move your company beyond the survival mode by deriving intelligence that catalyzes a start-up.

If you are convinced with data’s importance in your business, your next question will be about how you make use of that data.  That’s correct, because it is not just about gathering data; but it is about data maturity.  Your team has to acquaint itself with various tools & skills.  According to most experts, data mining & visualization rank on top of this list.  This is vouched for by a Business Broadway research.

More about Data Mining & Visualization

For those of you who are bamboozled by these terms, let’s give you a brief introduction to the two before we head onto talking about why they are important.

Data Mining is a technique that is used to derive patterns in data.  Most new start-ups stop at the point of collecting data.  We have clients who collected data for years, and felt contended by the extravagant amount of information they were able to congregate.  However, that was of no good until we helped them generate intelligence with our data mining skills.  Data Mining will establish relations between factors that will tell you what really is important for your business and what simply is a waste of time.

Data Visualization, on the other hand, is a visual presentation of data.  It can be displayed in a pictorial or graphical format.   For those non-technical stakeholders of your firm, visualization will let them grasp difficult concepts and even identify new patterns in the data.

Importance of these Skills

From the definition of the two terms, you would have understood why these two skills are imperative.  Internet and other modes of communication are opening up avenues for gathering more data.  Warehousing this can also be handled with various technical and non-technical means.  However, the real difference comes about when relationships are established in the data and it is presented in a graphical format for decision making.

Research by Business Broadview correlated the possession of data mining & visualization skills with project success.  It graded various data scientists’ proficiency with data mining & visualization, and related that with their satisfaction with the project’s results.  It was found that data scientists with higher skills in data mining & visualization had higher project success and satisfaction.

The study also analyzed the significance of these skills in 4 major job roles, i.e. business, developer, creative, and researcher.  For each of these job roles, data mining & visualization ranked in the top 5 most-coveted skills.

Next Steps…

In conclusion, data becomes valuable when you do something with it.  Here are some steps you can take to incorporate data mining and visualization in your business processes:

1. Evaluate where your company stands with these skills at this juncture
2. Compare your company’s skills with the competition
3. Set tangible goals for improvement in the next 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years.
4. Connect data to innovation, and use it accordingly.

Now as you have learnt about the importance of data mining and visualization skills, grab this detailed whitepaper on what are the techniques and methods to actionable analytics approach. This whitepaper will help you implement and execute a sensible and ROI-based analytics system in your organization.