Excerpt: Data Interpretation is a very essential part it comes to have key information about a company and its statistics at a glance. I’ve made an effort to pen down a few goo Data presentation practices.
The trait of being able to study important data related to a business and instantaneously tailoring them to the needs of customers is perhaps the vital differentiating factor between successful enterprises and failures.
A major demand of modern day enterprises is to gather authentic and timely data about the transactions from the IT databank of the company, these statistics should aid entrepreneurs to take useful business outcomes.
The financial head of the company should have access to the organizations latest numbers on marketing, expenditure, prospective cash inflows, average income etc. The current day figures maybe easily available but if he wants to make a critical analysis for a longer period of time then it is mostly a difficult task involving speaking to many people and making the IT department work overtime etc.
If the data were easily available strategic decisions could be taken on the move thus saving lots of organizational time. For instance the production manager with access to sales data can decide on what products need to be manufactured on priority based on the demand or the financial head can take strategic investment/ expenditure decisions based on the revenue and sales figures available. Companies who invest on more advanced IT can enable even frontline sales staff by giving them access to data about the results of different campaigns so they can concentrate on those yielding good results.
Most managers find it difficult to visualize these linkages between company performance and IT infrastructure. Primarily because they feel that IT infrastructure would necessitate hiring of experts to manage them. Another flaw lies in most organizations data storage methodologies, which is usually stored in bits and pieces across department and to collate all of them together would require considerable amount of effort and time and after all this it is seldom as per the requirements of the top-management.
In a bid to prevent this chaos several organizations are using a new software tool ‘Dashboard’ which facilitates staff to access required data easily. Simply put ‘dashboard’ is a screen which has elements to suit the individual needs of users. The screen has elements which connect users to market news, film summaries, financial investments and sometimes jokes and humor too. These links enable users to get detailed information about one particular subject or several topics.
Marketing executives can have the sales reports flashing, there could be film reviews glowing in some other users screen. There could be graphs and tables to support data presentation, market analysis/ reports about the company’s performance during the last quarter etc. Moreover companies can limit the type of data that the users can access, based on the hierarchy too.
These kind of user-specified screens help various departments join forces and work towards the broad goals of the organization. A suitable example could be the sales director of the company sharing the results of a particular promotional activity with the entire team. In most organizations the grassroots level salesman will not have access to the management and hence this will help build a rapport and improve motivation among front line staff.
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