Make Your Data Work For You
Data-Driven Decisions
What Decisions Drive Your Business?
The COVID-19 pandemic forced every industry to speed up digital transformation efforts. Our clients are looking for ways to build upon and enhance the initiatives started in the past few years. Better access and understanding of data through data visualization and dashboarding is a quick and easy-to-accomplish way to accelerate digital transformation, drive collaboration, and improve decision-making.
Today, we are inundated with data and constantly interact with dynamic, customized, consumer-oriented dashboards, from cars to smartwatches to entertainment user profiles. Sensors and trackers are capturing data at an ever-increasing pace from a wide variety of sources. The quantity available keeps growing, but our ability to process that data effectively is limited. Graphs, charts, trends, and tables to communicate information have been widely used since the 18th century. These visuals present data in ways that are easy to understand and act upon. But until recently, it required effort to turn data into insights. Making decisions might have meant time-consuming data-crunching for analysis by a team of specialists before reports could be generated and visuals designed for distribution to teams that needed them.
Data dashboards automate and streamline data crunching and data analysis. For the day-to-day decisions that your business needs to make, dashboards can be used to give the right amount of information, developed to show exactly what your team needs to see to work more effectively. Data storyboards can provide the predictive and descriptive detail that drives good decision-making in a form that is user-friendly and easy to understand. Data that once appeared unrelated or was locked into information silos can be analyzed to identify critical intersections, without risking source data. Using dashboard reporting, teams can better prioritize goals and visualize multiple solutions to business problems.
Align Your Business Processes Using Data Dashboards
Financial reporting, sampling programs, asset performance management – in addition to decision-making, the data you need for day-to-day operations can be used to improve business needs alignment, address and clarify questions, and educate and train staff and external stakeholders. Resource management, operations management, asset management, project management and process management all benefit from dashboard reporting for decision-making at the lowest possible level.
KJ’s team of data and program specialists can review your business processes, available data, and data collection to identify critical assets and functions for data collection and performance management. By understanding your business or project goals, we can help establish the decision authority and data required at each stage to develop strategies to collect, store, manage, and analyze your data. With the right data management plan and reporting tools, your team can act with confidence.
Our Applied Data Management (ADM) group can help identify opportunities to transform field data collection and quickly turn data points into trends and predictions. Using easy-access mobile data capture, field teams can reduce the time spent on data collection. Collected data are quickly pulled into business intelligence dashboards for real-time insight into processes and projects. Disseminating dashboards to your team can keep all your stakeholders informed without requiring extensive reports or meetings. Less time spent on data collection means more time for solid decision-making based on analysis.
Our Strategic Asset Management (SAM) group can help establish the performance indicators you need to better understand how you manage your asset performance. Based on your performance goals, we can build dashboard reports that deliver insights into your current performance. Our team understands innovation-driven business technologies through hands-on practical experience, technical expertise, and theoretical knowledge. We can help you analyze your existing data management plan to understand where your data is coming from and what insights you need to improve your performance.
No Need for Painstaking Database Integration
In the past, to get systems to communicate and share the data needed for decision-making meant painstaking integrations or migrations. Today’s data dashboards use business intelligence software to draw from multiple data sets, pulling key insights from enormous quantities of data. Visualizations can be customized to display specific data from multiple sources while allowing users to drill down into the data for a more detailed analysis. With a customized dashboard, you have the knowledge to make decisions based on data rather than instinct.
Dashboards are used to give the right amount of information, and they are developed to show your team what they need to see to work more effectively. Data storyboards can provide predictive and descriptive detail that can drive decision-making. Data that once appeared unrelated, or was locked into data silos, can be analyzed to identify critical intersections, without risking source data.
Break Down Data Silos to Access Your Insights
Information drives business. The ability to locate, review, and assess information is the foundation of knowledge-based work. This makes data access and data management increasingly critical to performance in almost every industry.
Locking critical data in data silos can lead to flawed decision-making. When you lack access to all available data, it is hard to know what has been missed. Data silos mean inconsistent data and increased errors because different departments may format and track data differently. Without alignment it can be hard to know what data is available, or how to use it effectively. The same information may be stored in multiple places in multiple forms. Changes in one document or one database may not be applied to other versions of the same information, increasing risk of miscalculation.
Data silos are not just an information problem – the silo mentality can hurt your business culture. If workgroups view data as theirs, they may resist sharing. Hoarding data may become part of the culture, causing disfunction at every level. Often, data silos are the result of legacy software systems or databases that do not play well with other systems, not intentional hoarding. But the effect is the same. Data isolation and its negative impacts becomes the status quo.
Breaking down data silos and sharing information opens communication between workgroups and reminds staff that they are involved in a shared mission of success. Democratized data – data for all! – can keep staff engaged and aligned with common goals. Using dashboards to communicate can reduce the resistance to sharing source data while also providing everyone the information they need to perform effectively. It is not necessary to integrate data sources for good communication. Business intelligence dashboards pull data from multiple, sometimes incompatible, sources and virtually integrate the information.
Having a comprehensive data management plan can identify and breakdown data silos and siloed thinking. Dashboards can help bridge the gaps in data management, and KJ’s team of data and program specialists can help find strategies that suit your business and data collection needs. Setting data standards to structure data in ways that facilitate business intelligence and analytics can encourage the development of data warehouses. But for organizations with large amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data, for which data cleansing would be an expensive and time-consuming effort, a data “lake” may be a simpler option.
A data lake acts as a repository for all your structured and unstructured data, and everything in between. The data can be used in its raw form by a wide variety of data analytics, business intelligence, and other applications. Even organizations with clear data management policies can benefit from the opportunities a data lake provides.
Streamline Understanding of Business Performance
Why wait for monthly or annual reports to understand the key factors impacting your business or department? Using dashboards for reporting provides access to real-time understanding of progress toward goals. Reports tend to be longer, historical documents that memorialize information after the fact. Dashboard reporting shows you what’s happening now and gives you the opportunity to interact with data for more detailed understanding and immediate action.
Information that might have taken hours or even days to research, compile, and analyze can be assessed in real-time with the most recent data. Reporting through dashboards can provide custom views of data that meet specific needs. Data can be organized in easy-to-understand visuals. Customized dashboards can be developed to meet the needs of special projects, reporting on performance indicators unique to the goal.
Custom views can be developed in layered dashboards to provide the right amount of relevant data. Layering dashboards can keep reporting together for quick roll-up between a department’s individual projects and overview of department progress, or between the performance of individual departments and overall corporate progress. In traditional reporting, this information might be physically separated for sequential review in a document.
In dashboard reporting, the information is nested and interactive so you can quickly move between layers and drill down to understand what is happening at each level. If you need send reports to internal or external teams, dashboards can be quickly filtered for relevant information to be loaded into a document. The once painstaking work of building and analyzing content, and developing visuals, is done in an instant, giving more time and space to understanding how to act on the information.
Use the Right Tool For Your Data
Although there are some apps and tools that are better suited to particular data sets, the best tool is the one available. At KJ, we are software-agnostic. We can recommend software and tools for your project, but we can work with what you have to build analytics and visuals that give you the information you need. We can develop visuals in a variety of programming languages to meet your needs.
Software we use:
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Asset Risk Management Solution for a City’s Pipeline Renewal and Replacement Program
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Standardized Electronic Data Collection Lead to Gold and Silver Wildlife Habitat Council Certifications for Specialty Ingredients Company
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Untangling 100 Years of Pipelines to Bring Recycled and Potable Water to Public Parks
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Digital Transformation on Dredging Data Results in Better Project Management, Communication
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Well Standardization Tools Support Reliable and Uninterrupted Water Service in a Major District
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Pharmaceutical Company Boosts the Efficiency of Groundwater Evaluation through Integrated Data Tools
