Overview

Once data has been shaped according to a consumer's needs, they'll likely want to drive insights, decisions, and actions using that data. Sometimes this data is pushed into dedicated storage for a specific tool (e.g. PowerBI) and other times, consumers will opt to read directly from a data source that you provide (direct federated access or through a federated API). Regardless of the method, it generally isn't impactful to simply show a table of data to someone and say "that's our data, go make a decision"; most decision-makers want the data summarised, interpreted, and represented in a way that it is easy to derive insights that can drive a decision to stay on course or to make a change.

In this section, we'll first talk about how to represent data in dashboards, because it is typically the most common element in Business Intelligence. We'll also offer a list of references for Visualisation tooling for you to browse. Additionally, we'll do a practical exercise to create a visualisation based on a previous exercise.