Data Visualization: An Emerging, Powerful Risk AwarenessTool

Executive Summary

Effective data visualization enables managers - often at a glance - to see and grasp risk patterns or trends that might otherwise lie buried. Over the past three decades computer systems have acquired enormous capacity to collect, store, and analyze business intelligence data in real time. The availability of such data for sound, timely decision making is especially vital to national and global companies with extensive markets, locations, and supply chains.

Ironically, inherent human limitations often leave organizations unable to take full advantage of this rich body of information. The brain of even the ablest manager has only so much capacity to sort out and make sense of all the data coming in. Competing responsibilities, time constraints, and other factors add to the problem.

Fortunately, data visualization has evolved in recent years in a wide range of applications to bridge the gap between data overload and human cognition. It is proving invaluable where businesses, government agencies, emergency responders, and military campaigns must make sense of constant and growing information streams – and its potential is still growing.

Data visualization seeks to render the key attributes of scattered, complex, computerprocessed data in visual forms that people can grasp intuitively – ideally at a glance. These images, generated as an extension of data collection and analysis, range from familiar x-y axis plot graphs to more sophisticated “heat maps” that overlay data patterns and trends on geographic regions.

This paper underscores the opportunity that data visualization offers to increase management effectiveness in the governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) space. It outlines this emerging capability and the benefits it offers managers when they add this capability to their systems for collecting, understanding, and acting on potential or emerging risks. At a time when events move so quickly and managers are expected to deal with ever more sources of information, data visualization is increasingly a “must-have” tool to minimize vulnerabilities and keep a competitive edge.

For more, read the paper!