Telling Story with Data
In the business world, data is an essential asset one can have. Often, business owners are not using their data to their maximum potential in making day-to-day data-driven decision-making. This is where the data analyst role comes in to help the business owners as a decision support system. Excellent decision-making depends on the quality of information that comes into play. A data analyst must help business owners understand their business situation by translating data into meaningful insights.
The first step to giving meaningful insight is asking questions or forming a hypothesis, then compiling and diving into available data to find the corresponding answers. Let’s say you have a restaurant business, and you want to know how your business is doing. Some questions examples that you might want to answers are:
- How many orders are you doing per day? How is the delivery vs. dine-in doing?
- Which branch is performing well and not well?
- How much is, on average, your customer spends on your restaurant?
- How excellent is the rating that you received from your feedback platform?
- What are your best-selling items?
As a business owner, you want to optimize your business to the highest potential, so data is crucial for knowing where you stand in terms of your businesses’ performance. Without data, it will be like when you drive a car without mirrors, it is hazardous, and even it can harm others. So before going into Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence, one should master the basics of data analytics, and the easy way is to visualize it. With data visualization, it is easier to tell a story on the questions that one wants to answer. Here is an example of a dashboard that represents a basic overview of a restaurant business.
There are lots of ways to visualize data. One of the easy tools to use is PowerBI. It can integrate with files, databases, Python and R scripting, and even web content. You can check on my article on the step-by-step of creating a PowerBI visualization.
