Author: Kayleigh Alexandra

Big data can easily feel dispassionate. You’re drawing snippets of information from countless sources, bringing them all together, and parsing that body of data to find notable patterns and associations. It doesn’t care about feelings unless they can be reliably measured.

This is why plenty of people remain uncomfortable about the prospect of applying it to anything other than financial or campaign-related matters. Conventional wisdom resists the treatment of workers as utilities, and doesn’t like reducing productivity to simple facts and figures.

There are creative elements to succeeding in retail, of course, but they’re all rooted in extensive data analysis. By recounting and parsing the facts of the past, you can forecast the future, and make appropriate alterations to your strategy — setting stock levels, tweaking layouts, and making major decisions about the positioning of your brand.

If you’ve seen “The Matrix”, then you may recall characters developing the ability to essentially see the virtual reality in the code streaming down their screens. Sadly, outside of fiction, humanity isn’t all that great at interpreting vast swathes of raw data. In a time of granular analytics, that’s why data visualization has become so important.