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Maximizing the Impact of Data Products Through Analytics and Visualization

October 7, 2024
10 Min Read

Companies are increasingly using data products to compete. The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that data-driven firms will account for 70% of global GDP by 2030. Advanced analytics and visualization have transformed data products into strategic assets that improve decision-making, customer insights, and operational efficiency.

What makes a data product “high-value”? It goes beyond collecting massive volumes of data. The real value comes from powerful analytics and engaging visualization of raw data into actionable insights. This combination maximizes data impact, from exploring hidden trends to boosting consumer experiences.

Key Challenges in Building Data Products

Creating high-value data products calls for overcoming many significant obstacles that can limit the whole capability of data-driven insights. 

The following are difficulties that businesses often and most frequently face today:

Data silos and fragmentation

One of the main challenges in creating successful data products is the prevalence of data silos and fragmentation. Separately stored data by several departments or systems inside a company makes integration and analysis challenging. Incomplete or false conclusions derived from fragmented data might slow down decision-making procedures. Companies risk losing significant chances to maximize operations or better grasp consumer behavior without a consistent data perspective.

For example, Volkswagen encountered a similar challenge when dealing with scattered data across multiple divisions and global operations. The company's data was kept on various platforms, resulting in insight delays, inconsistent reporting, and operational inefficiencies.

To address this, Volkswagen launched the "Volkswagen Industrial Cloud" project in collaboration with AWS. The idea was to combine data from its 122 plants worldwide into a single unified platform. By breaking down data silos and integrating data across the enterprise, Volkswagen increased manufacturing efficiency, streamlined processes, and gained a complete perspective of its global operations.

Scalability

The volume of data companies create increases with their size. Scaling data products to manage more considerable data quantities while preserving speed and performance becomes difficult. Under the strain of processing enormous volumes of data, traditional infrastructure can sometimes falter, resulting in slower processing times, more running expenses, and less consistent insights. Companies want scalable systems to expand alongside their data requirements without sacrificing performance.

Netflix, for example, encountered scalability challenges when its user base grew fast, reaching more than 130 million members worldwide. The massive volume of viewing data presented a problem for their recommendation engines. To solve this, Netflix shifted its infrastructure to the cloud in 2016, extending its data processing capabilities to accommodate petabytes of data while providing personalized suggestions to consumers in real-time with no performance impact.

Ensuring data accuracy and quality

Problems with data quality may seriously compromise the value of data products. Should the data be incorrect, incomplete, or out-of-date, the insights derived from it could distort or even damage corporate decisions. Inefficiencies, lost income, and reputation loss are further outcomes of poor data quality. High-value data products depend on maintaining high data quality standards across many systems and guaranteeing that data is cleaned, validated, and enriched before use.

In 2018, Facebook faced severe concerns after a data breach disclosed erroneous information and allowed third-party apps to access user data. This event affected over 50 million customers and resulted in a $5 billion fine by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for privacy violations. In response, Facebook revamped its data management policies, enforcing severe data validation and security protocols to maintain data accuracy and user confidence.

Top 5 Benefits of Using Advanced Analytics and Visualization

The combination of these tools provides many benefits. For example, using these technologies in data product creation can result in:

Improved decision-making

Advanced analytics lets companies examine vast amounts of data in real time and provide clear insights that guide wise decisions. Businesses can increase general agility in decision-making by evaluating trends, projecting future results, and rapidly changing their plans.

Enhanced data storytelling

Visualization technologies help simplify difficult data sets into understandable, aesthetically pleasing forms so stakeholders may act on them. This guarantees faster team alignment when analyzing data trends and helps with better insight communication.

Identifying hidden patterns

Advanced analytics can expose trends, anomalies, and relationships that might be missed. Using predictive and diagnostic analytics tools helps companies find hidden prospects, streamline operations, and avoid potential problems.

Increased operational efficiency

Applying analytics to operational data helps companies find inefficiencies and streamline processes, lowering downtime, minimizing costs, and raising productivity. Automating regular analytics tasks frees resources for more strategic efforts and speeds up insights.

Better customer personalization

Advanced analytics give companies a deep understanding of consumer behavior and preferences, enabling them to make highly customized offers. Data visualization enhances this by giving a clear perspective of this information, allowing the companies to customize their offerings to meet particular consumer requirements more precisely.

Best Practices for Developing Data Products with Advanced Analytics

Building high-value data products requires meticulous planning and adherence to best practices to guarantee that data is usable, scalable, and provides significant insights. 

Here are several leading best practices:

Establish clear business objectives

Define clear objectives before developing a data product. Align the data product's capabilities with the company's goals, such as customer retention, operational efficiency, or revenue growth. This keeps the data product relevant to business demands.

Invest in scalable infrastructure

Businesses must scale their infrastructure as data volumes increase. Cloud platforms are versatile and scalable, meeting growing data demands without losing performance. The infrastructure allows organizations to develop their data products as needed without considerable cost or operational disturbance.

Seamlessly integrate data sources

Data products thrive on integration. APIs, data lakes, or other integration techniques can create a unified data system. This seamless connectivity improves analytics and makes data from diverse departments or systems easy to access and analyze, giving a comprehensive perspective of business activities.

Role of Data Visualization in High-Value Data Products

Making advanced analytics actionable and understandable requires data visualization. Visualization may simplify complex datasets and provide immediate insights and business outcomes when designed well. 

Visualization helps create high-value data products. Some examples include:

Making data actionable

Visualization enables companies to spot trends, anomalies, and patterns rapidly in their data, transforming raw data into insights capable of influencing decisions. Simplifying data's complexity helps stakeholders act more powerfully on insights.

Improving user experience

Well-designed dashboards and data visualization tools improve user experience by presenting data dynamically and intuitively. Self-service systems let users investigate data to acquire a more in-depth understanding without sophisticated technical knowledge.

Enhancing predictive analytics

Visualization helps predictive analytics by clearly showing future trends, allowing businesses to make proactive corporate decisions. Moreover, visualization improves the usefulness and impact of predictive models by simplifying the data interpretation, therefore enhancing either consumer demand prediction or equipment failure.

Ready to Maximise Data Product Value?

High-value data products require strategic, sophisticated analytics and data visualization, not just data collection. Businesses can turn data into meaningful insights that fuel innovation and success by following best practices, overcoming critical barriers, and using the proper tools.

Are you seeking to improve your data strategy? Acceldata's comprehensive data observability platform lets you combine data, assure quality, and unleash powerful analytics and visualization. Additionally, Acceldata enables you to create scalable, high-value data products that work. Explore how Acceldata can help you achieve data excellence by changing your approach to data product development.


Summary

High-value data products with actionable insights require more than data collecting. This blog discusses data silos, scalability, and data quality in data product development. It demonstrates how advanced analytics and data visualization help decision-making, operational efficiency, and customer customization. Companies can improve their data strategy by setting clear business goals and investing in scalable infrastructure. Acceldata provides data observability and real-time analytics to help companies maximize their data products and grow.

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