Data is becoming increasingly important to organizations. In fact, both public and private organizations base much of their decision-making on data. So facts are pushing gut feeling into the background, and not without success. Research by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson shows that data-driven decision-making greatly improves the productivity and profitability of organizations. Positive relationships have also been found between data-driven improvement and organizations’ return on equity, return on assets, asset utilization and market value. The combination of the ever-growing availability and variety of data and the development of algorithms is the biggest driver of data-driven decision-making. These developments are expected to accelerate further in the near future. So the question is not whether your organization should base decision-making on data, but how best to do it!
Before decision-making can be based on data, a series of steps must be taken. Data visualization is an important component in the entire process of data-driven decision-making. Data visualization attempts to present important data to decision-makers in the clearest possible way. Many organizations do this through dashboards. So data-driven decision-making can improve by making these dashboards more effective.
Much research has been done on best practices for setting up dashboards. Several years back, published research suggested that adding storytelling to dashboards positively affects their effectiveness. Supply Value’s research has shown that this is indeed the case. The white paper you can download describes how storytelling can be added to dashboards and in what context storytelling is useful to a greater or lesser extent. It also reviews other best practices for setting up dashboards. You can download the wihtepaper below.
