Current landscape
The data visualization market is an exploding market that will continue to see growth and demand. In the past few years, the amount of data generated through various technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) and other data sources is increasing exponentially. Considering the future opportunities associated with visual data representation, several companies are investing in enhancing their analytics and visualization capabilities with continuous investments in research and development (Fortune Business Insights, July 2020). Several industries, including education, are shifting towards visual analytics, scientific visualization, and information visualization to analyze data. This will contribute to the growing need as well as a saturation of able contenders within this market.
Restraining Factors
Costs can be a restraining factor associated with visualization tools and platforms. This will make it difficult for small and medium enterprises to adopt the software. According to (Fortune Business Insights, July 2020) the inflexible costs offered by some data visualization companies can become restrictive to smaller enterprises who do not need to purchase licenses inclusive of all features. Moreover, the complexity of other support services such as deployment, implementation, maintenance and staff training are also costly considerations. The lack of centralized data security associated with visualization platforms is also a major barrier for the wide-scale adoption of data visualization tools (Fortune Business Insights, July 2020). Many Canadian academic institutions are wary of hosting data on international servers because of privacy and security concerns. Finally, another factor to consider is that graphic design and animation tools like Adobe Illustrator and Animate, HTML5 coding and even PowerPoint are integrating robust data visualization features into their platforms.
Source: Fortune Business Insights report ID: FB1103259
The far-reaching benefits of data visualization is being implemented in different industries across the globe. These industries include:
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banking and financial services
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insurance
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construction
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real estate
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consumer goods
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education
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government
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healthcare
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pharmaceuticals
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IT, telecommunications
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retail and e-commerce
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transportation
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environmental services
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non-profit organizations and others.
Here is a sample of available resources that support data visualization. These lists are not meant to be exhaustive, but are meant to provide an insight to the resources currently available to support data visualization.
When selecting a data visualization tool, it's up to you to decide what tool will best support your needs and will align with your technological comfort levels. Some utilize templates and heavily assist the user in the mapping and building of data visuals, while others require you to build the visualization with the use of coding and graphic design tools and require a steep learning curve to learn.
Infographic builders - although similar to data visualization dashboards, infographics tend to represent static data and are not connected to back end datasets.
Many Eyes by IBM
PowerPoint can be a surprisingly easy to use static visualization builder. Learn how to use PowerPoint to create an infographic here.
Education-centric Data Visualization Dashboards
iDashboard – A robust data visualizer tool that caters to a wide audience of users. iDashboard provides learning resources, setup assistance and templates specifically catered to the education market.
Oncourse System for Education automatically translates thousands of K-12 data points into colorful, intuitive infographics
Inetsoft has a series of dashboard templates specifically designed to cater to educational institutions
Datahero have established themselves well in their market segment. They also have dashboards that cater to education stakeholders.
Data visualization
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Data Visualization Dashboards
Tableau is a prominent data visualization tool within its market. It can handle large datasets with relative ease.
Google’s Datastudio is a free to use that turns data into informative, easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable dashboards and reports.
Fusioncharts boasts a large collection of dashboard templates including open sourced templates.
Qlikview - offers data visualization capabilities, powerful business intelligence, analytics and enterprise reporting capabilities and a clean and clutter-free user interface
Datawrapper offers a basic plan that is free to use.
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Highcharts, Plotly and Sisense are also products worth considering when evaluating your data visualization solutions.