Pentecostals in their usual attitude of rejection of Catholic tradition and doctrines will usually ask Catholics to “show them where it is in the Bible”.
In like manner, in the academic and business landscape of today’s technology, researchers, scholars, CEOs, managers, investors, and others will always ask you to “show them the data”. Any scholarly or business decision that is not based on data (quantitative or qualitative ) is regarded as baseless, or worse still, biased and anecdotal. Business and scholarly ideas become more convincing if they are based on sound empirical data (statistically significant outcome) and after rigorous analysis. Visualization of the data adds a new level of easy comprehension that inspires personal or managerial decisions. Today there are softwares regarded as Decision Support Systems (DSS) that rely on data to aid enterprise decision making.
You don’t need to be a data analyst, or data scientist, or a researcher to make some intelligent decisions in your business or personal undertakings. Data can be obtained virtually everywhere ranging from your day-to-day observation, interview with users of a particular product, people around you, market surveys, web traffic, e-commerce, online transactions and social media, to mention but a few. All you need is to capture the data manually or electronically. Capturing data can take the form of a simple record, kept and updated daily, weekly, or monthly which will form the basis of analysis and decision in the future.
Data can be captured through surveys (eg. online using qualtrics, survey monkey, and others ), or manually on paper, interviews (structured and semi-structured ), focus groups, field observation, case studies, library research, and through the use of analytical softwares, such as Google Analytic, which capture and analyze web traffic data.
Data can be analyzed with software such as SPSS. Data can be visualized using tools like Tableau, Pie Chart, Bar Chart, Google Chart, and histograms, to mention but a few. There are also qualitative data analysis softwares, e.g Atlas.ti, Laximancer,and others; and other statistical techniques for quantitative data such as correlation and regression, ANOVA, MANOVA, MANCOVA and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM),among others.
Analytical and visualization tools are an important feature of most modern apps. Google, for instance, has analytics software used on websites to analyze web traffic. Phone software ( Android or iOS ) has data analysis and visualization features that give information, for instance, about data usage according to your billing cycle or subscription cycle. These tools help in making decisions such as limiting data usage, calculating data cost, ad-targeting on the web, and even more.
You will be surprised the day your monthly or annual business income and expenditure are analyzed or visualized, for instance, in a histogram. You will probably start thinking differently about that business afterward. Many businesses go bankrupt because there is no way of analyzing or visualizing what’s happening inside of it. Data analysis and visualization can save businesses from making bad decisions or going bankrupt. It gives you an early heads up before the worst happens.
Data analysis and visualization tools on mobile banking apps do the same job, which help users make an informed decision about their expenditure. Recently I downloaded the Truebill App ( an app that analyzes and visualizes banking transactions ) which opened my eyes to a lot of facts I couldn’t have imagined. Truebill will remind you to cancel upcoming bills, if for example, you entered a trial version of the software and would be charged at the end of the trial period.
Don’t try to convince anyone about the need for changes or ask people to invest in your start-up if you can’t provide the data to convince them why investing in your business will be profitable for them or what benefits the changes will accrue. What I am trying to say is that it is a waste of time trying to convince your boss or anyone about the need for a change if you can’t provide a data-driven and solution-based idea.
We live in a world of huge quantities of data. Volumes of data are being generated hourly. Data mining techniques are now deployed to analyze large quantum data set to discover patterns of information that could be used for predictions or the generation of new information. The world of academia, organizations,and industries have benefitted so much from data mining. You can also, no matter the level at which you operate, keep track of your records and use them to make data-driven decisions.
Make intelligent decisions on future projections, budgets and business start-ups based on data! Avoid sentimentalism, stop guessing. Be objective.
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