How is custom data visualization software useful for your business?

Data has become an inseparable aspect of our modern life. From regular media consumption to day-to-day business operations, it has been a vital gear that underpins most of our modern infrastructure. Businesses and consumers alike rely on data to find solutions, identify risks, and make informed decisions in value creation.

The role of data in today’s technological landscape is undeniably crucial. The integration of big data across multitudes of industries, from banking and financial services to healthcare, has pushed the use of information to even greater heights. To bring modern conveniences without interruption, a growing number of businesses turn to advanced data analytics to sieve and process information from larger and more intricate data sets—often in real time.

Extracting and organizing this enormous and ever-expanding array of information into neat and digestible graphics cannot be possible without data visualization tools.

But what is data visualisation, and how can it be used to capture complex information?

This article will cover all about custom data visualization software and its myriad benefits to your business.

Defining data visualization

Before we delve further into data visualization and what it entails, we first need to examine the close relationship between information analysis and our predisposition towards visual imagery.

Humans are wired to recognize unique patterns in shapes, sounds, and colors—a unique trait honed by our ancestors from their early days of foraging for food and evading predators in the wild. This evolutionary behavior easily explains our collective penchant for items with multisensory stimuli reflected in much of our rich cultural history and art. And it is, in part, what makes visualized data particularly appealing to us.

Beyond its aesthetic value, data visualization provides a graphical snapshot of a given reality. It is, in essence, a form of storytelling that utilizes visual elements like graphs, charts, and maps to signify any patterns, outliers, trends, and even anomalies from an extensive, typically nebulous data set. Contextualizing information in this fashion not only keeps us engaged but also helps us identify valuable insights more efficiently.

Practical applications

Data visualization allows us to package complicated topics in simple, visual-rich narratives. By tailoring information like so, we can also explore new ways of conveying stories and engaging with our audience across use cases. This includes sales and marketing, scientific research, engineering, and more. 

Here are the many ways data visualization can be implemented to support business operations:

Behavioral assessment – This type of data analysis seeks to quantify empirical results from more subjective research areas. This approach helps you analyze and monitor market behaviors against various variables, including changes in the environment, the presence of disruptions, and frequencies of engagement in a given timescale.

Project planning – You can execute stronger project management by visualizing your project roadmap, timelines, and requirements across distributed team members. The use of the Gantt chart is a perfect example of this.

Trend analysis – Identifying the changing trends over a certain period is perhaps the most prominent use of data visualization in statistical analysis. To streamline this process, companies can automate the recognition of patterns and regularities in the data sets with machine learning, signal processing, and computer-based data gathering.

Correlational research – You can use visualized data to examine the causal relationship between two or more variables in your research design. The results will then determine the direction and the degree of interdependencies between these variables.

Risk identification – Assessing the risk indicators that come with a business decision is often strenuous given the unpredictable nuances of internal and external factors at play. By pinpointing the risk levels of an executive decision relative to time and costs, data visualization helps you navigate business uncertainties with better tactical acuity.

Benefits of custom data visualization

Given the importance of data visualization in business, as demonstrated above, naturally, there are myriad off-the-shelf solutions available in the market to pick, ranging from popular applications like Microsoft Suite to enterprise-focused programs like Tableau and Oracle Analytics.

However, despite the apparent convenience of using ready-made applications, it’s critical to acknowledge their inherent limitations in accommodating more specific data analytics requirements. For example, some programs cannot provide accurate visualization directly from unsanitized data, while others offer only limited data models and indicators with no room for customization.

In contrast, a custom software solution challenges the boundaries of business analytics by constantly reinventing the delicate configurations between a user’s creativity and fundamental design principles. For that reason, it aims to showcase better pictorial representations with more flexible and interactive use of the underlying data.  

Here are a few more benefits that further cement custom solutions as the go-to software option for your business:

Enhanced accessibility

A custom solution allows businesses to reimagine how the data they gather can be best represented and manipulated visually with tools and metrics of their choice. This degree of freedom also affords companies the ability to wrangle important insights from the source data quicker without the need for specialized expertise. This, in turn, makes the data more accessible to end users, from collection to dissemination.

Incisive business intelligence

Custom data visualization explicitly combines the best practices of business analytics, data mining, and visualization infrastructure to help a company assess its past performance and plan for more robust data-driven strategies in the future. Likewise, with a custom solution, team members can track key metrics and business objectives seamlessly across the data pipeline to better understand the value they generate.

Highly configurable visual reports

With a high degree of automation needed to tackle the collection and extraction of big data, the presence of volatile variables can quickly affect business outcomes. This unpredictability means that businesses must be well-prepared to generate configurable reports at a moment’s notice to accurately reflect any changes in momentum for better accountability and transparency.

A more intuitive UX design

Designing an intuitive data tool with a seamless user experience ensures that everyone can produce precise and easy-to-understand data visualization. By strategically arranging the tools and raw data within the user’s reach, a custom solution can generate charts and reports with more refined information flow at no risk of omission and error.

Customizable templates

What differentiates a tailored data visualization tool from its mass commercial counterparts is its ability to build a vast selection of interactive data templates by cleverly pairing multimedia technology with advanced data modeling. With a proprietary data tool, you can, thus, create detailed visual reports that are perfectly in tune with your strategic roadmap and branding.

Platform integration

It isn’t uncommon for companies to use a wide range of third-party tools to execute and gauge several functions independently. The most prominent of those encompass a task management program, a CTM (content management software) application, and a CRM (customer relationship management) tool.

Nonetheless, there is a caveat to this practice. Different applications typically implement their own sets of benchmarks to measure specific performance indicators. Consequently, companies must standardize these results to avoid discrepancies in further audits and assessments.

This lack of interoperability makes the entire process inefficient and time-consuming. To mitigate this issue, you can use a custom visualization tool to automatically integrate and display contrasting metrics from various data sets without encountering any system conflicts.

More collaborative workflow

Organization silos often occur when different functions within a business fail to establish adequate means of exchanging knowledge and information, resulting in the pursuit of competing interests. To prevent this management oversight and bridge the existing expectation gaps that follow, you can commission a custom data tool with the capacity to facilitate cross-sectoral collaboration.

This newly established platform will empower your teams and departments to communicate and align their measurable goals throughout data analysis easily. With this collaborative approach, end users across functions can distill more accurate actionable insights and pursue business objectives in line with the company’s overarching strategic planning.

Creating custom data visualization software with Asahi Technologies

Data visualization can strategically improve business processes and accelerate technology adoption in your company—all of which ultimately bring tangible benefits to your bottom line. Given our prior experience in engineering data visualization platforms to numerous clients, we’ve witnessed firsthand how this analytical innovation can enhance business opportunities.

Case in point, we helped Unilever develop a proprietary market delivery dashboard to closely monitor the trends impacting the procurement costs of production materials. This RPA-powered system aggregates data automatically from various sources before converting it into a nice, readable format, helping the company slash 16 hours of monotonous work and save on $50,000 in aggregate annual savings. By eliminating manual intervention, the market dashboard also improves the company’s purchasing decisions by at least 20% in material procurement costs and 40% in data accuracy.

Enabling a similar business transformation in your company is certainly within the realm of possibility. With proper planning and a seasoned technology partner at your call, you can translate your business requirements into a powerful product that elevates your analytical capabilities to the next level.

Ready to discuss your development plan? Reach out to us now to get started.

5 SIGNS THAT YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO CONSIDER LEGACY MIGRATION

Software technology has transformed the way people conduct business. It has helped digitize complex and routine processes, increase employee productivity with more streamlined management, and improve engagement with customers, partners, and suppliers—all of which significantly reduce day-to-day account and operational expenses. Besides cost reduction, this enhanced efficiency also empowers businesses to venture into new opportunities and connect with broader industry ecosystems, ultimately appreciating their bottom lines.

While a software application is vital to the success of any modern business, it needs proper maintenance and—on occasion—significant revamp to better adapt to the changing environments. Likewise, companies may sometimes expand rapidly in such a short amount of time that their existing systems fall short in adjusting to their operational scale-ups. In the era of rapidly shifting technology trends, modernizing obsolete software is, thus, highly essential to business continuity.

This article will cover the importance of legacy migration, the different tactical approaches to managing legacy systems, and how to recognize signs when businesses should migrate from outdated applications to new, cutting-edge solutions.

What is legacy migration?

To fully understand the scope of legacy migration and why it’s integral to business, we first need to take a closer look at legacy applications. A legacy application or a legacy system refers to a computing program that has become archaic due to the changing landscape of business and technology.

Much of the failure within a legacy application isn’t necessarily inherent in its codebase. But rather, it is induced by the waning structural support to maintain its performance over time, including the discontinuation of vendor updates and stability fixes.

This means that a legacy application can perfectly execute the tasks it was initially designed for. However, it eventually hits certain performance limitations as the business ventures outwards. These limitations prevent the assimilation of newer and more complex capabilities—including, among others, better data integration, more intuitive user interface, and cloud computing—failure of which would ultimately keep businesses at a standstill. 

To alleviate this problem, businesses may decide to refurbish their outdated IT systems with a more robust hardware infrastructure or a more advanced software platform—typically lightweight application frameworks like Spring Framework and cloud-based services like Microsoft Azure. In some instances, this system migration also involves a complete overhaul of the entire application architecture from a cumbersome monolithic design to highly decentralized and scalable containers known as microservices. All of these processes have come to be known as legacy migration.

Different types of legacy system management

Keeping a legacy system up to speed requires different applied solutions. Some legacy systems can perform optimally with just a few enhancements, while others need to relocate to an entirely new environment for better structural support. Knowing the distinctions between these methods is essential to determine the best course of action for your business. In essence, there are three common types of legacy system management in practice today, and they are as follows:

Lift-and-shift refers to the process of moving your entire application to a new environment without making any significant changes to the information, data, and functionalities contained therein. This process usually occurs when businesses move their application database from an on-premise server to a cloud platform. Any benefits reaped from the migration—such as lower operational costs, enhanced security, and reliable performance—are merely byproducts of the target environment.

Modernization, on the other hand, alludes to a systematic act of bolstering the legacy system with significant capability improvements primarily within its native environment. Any plans on relocation would only be viable if the move would offer substantial enhancements in functionalities. Examples of modernization include a website redesign for better user experience, system updates for additional features, and integration of new languages, libraries, frameworks, and infrastructure platforms.

Transformation seeks to combine the best practices of the two approaches. This process occurs when a business seeks to move the core functionalities of a legacy system into a more conducive platform while also making incremental or sequential improvements in capabilities and designs as necessary. Transformation is, thus, a preferred solution for companies seeking to innovate their business process by restructuring their applications.

When to know your business needs legacy migration?

An outdated software program can prove harmful to businesses. However, most are often unaware that their legacy applications are in serious need of an upgrade. It is partly because most software issues start small but soon compound into a bigger, more recurring problem if ignored. To nip this in the bud, you need to watch out for several signs that indicate this underlying problem.

Expensive maintenance costs

System maintenance takes place to rectify faults and hone software performance to meet business expectations. However, over the years, the hardware equipment that underpins this system will undergo its natural wear and tear, which will require more resources to fix down the line. Significant modifications to the software also affect delivery outcomes—progressively costing more money to operate.

Migrating your legacy application to a cloud environment, for example, will solve this problem. It will help you offset the costs incurred for maintenance, infrastructure upkeep, and licensing. Most cloud platforms also operate on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing you to save more on overheads.

Limited functionality

Software innovations have made significant headways in the last few years—propped up by the demand for more seamless digital services and interconnectivity among devices. Newer technologies and systems are designed with better compatibility across platforms, mainly to keep up with the rising data consumption, which some have estimated to reach 2.5 quintillion bytes each day.

As new technologies are proliferating at a rapid pace, legacy applications will surely lose out in terms of market outreach, accessibility, and functionality. To seize new market opportunities, businesses need to consider migrating their systems to better platforms.

Software inefficiency

Legacy systems are generally slow. It also takes up more resources to function, such as memory, processing power, disk space, and in some cases, more costly hardware requirements.

There are many reasons why an old system becomes bloated. It might be due to intrinsically limited storage and disk space. Software deterioration is also a common culprit plaguing the outdated business system—induced by a drastic environment change, lack of maintenance, improper installations of software applications, and unmonitored coding errors. If left unabated, all these issues can cause severe downtimes in your business operations and slow down your staff productivity.

Vulnerable data security

Outdated technology is more susceptible to cyberattacks as compared to newer systems. The main reason is that such technology presents more security loopholes for hackers—who likely wield more sophisticated tools—to learn and then exploit. The increasingly scarce resources coupled with the inevitable absence of vendor support to patch these system vulnerabilities also contribute to this problem. This suggests that no preemptive measures are sufficient to protect your system from an attack unless the business moves to a more advanced environment.

Regulatory non-compliance

Most older systems predate the enactments and amendments of current data and privacy laws. For example, the GDPR passed by the EU only came into motion in 2016, and the HIPAA Omnibus Rule became effective in 2013. As a result, these systems aren’t well-equipped to deal with the complexities of newer data requirements and compliance. Moreover, they require direct supervision and manual updates to be up to par, and such approaches do not necessarily rule out clerical errors.

Moving to a well-supported system is part of the growing pains of conducting business in an increasingly digital world. But with the right technology partner and proper planning, it doesn’t have to be. Asahi Technologies has helped numerous businesses modernize their processes and jumpstart their digital transformation with the right software solutions.

Need to migrate your legacy system? Reach out to us with your development inquiries to get started.

Software technology has transformed the way people conduct business. It has helped digitize complex and routine processes, increase employee productivity with more streamlined management, and improve engagement with customers, partners, and suppliers—all of which significantly reduce day-to-day account and operational expenses. Besides cost reduction, this enhanced efficiency also empowers businesses to venture into new opportunities and connect with broader industry ecosystems, ultimately appreciating their bottom lines.

While a software application is vital to the success of any modern business, it needs proper maintenance and—on occasion—significant revamp to better adapt to the changing environments. Likewise, companies may sometimes expand rapidly in such a short amount of time that their existing systems fall short in adjusting to their operational scale-ups. In the era of rapidly shifting technology trends, modernizing obsolete software is, thus, highly essential to business continuity.

This article will cover the importance of legacy migration, the different tactical approaches to managing legacy systems, and how to recognize signs when businesses should migrate from outdated applications to new, cutting-edge solutions.

What is legacy migration?

To fully understand the scope of legacy migration and why it’s integral to business, we first need to take a closer look at legacy applications. A legacy application or a legacy system refers to a computing program that has become archaic due to the changing landscape of business and technology.

Much of the failure within a legacy application isn’t necessarily inherent in its codebase. But rather, it is induced by the waning structural support to maintain its performance over time, including the discontinuation of vendor updates and stability fixes.

This means that a legacy application can perfectly execute the tasks it was initially designed for. However, it eventually hits certain performance limitations as the business ventures outwards. These limitations prevent the assimilation of newer and more complex capabilities—including, among others, better data integration, more intuitive user interface, and cloud computing—failure of which would ultimately keep businesses at a standstill. 

To alleviate this problem, businesses may decide to refurbish their outdated IT systems with a more robust hardware infrastructure or a more advanced software platform—typically lightweight application frameworks like Spring Framework and cloud-based services like Microsoft Azure. In some instances, this system migration also involves a complete overhaul of the entire application architecture from a cumbersome monolithic design to highly decentralised and scalable containers known as microservices. All of these processes have come to be known as legacy migration.

Different types of legacy system management

Keeping a legacy system up to speed requires different applied solutions. Some legacy systems can perform optimally with just a few enhancements, while others need to relocate to an entirely new environment for better structural support. Knowing the distinctions between these methods is essential to determine the best course of action for your business. In essence, there are three common types of legacy system management in practice today, and they are as follows:

Lift-and-shift refers to the process of moving your entire application to a new environment without making any significant changes to the information, data, and functionalities contained therein. This process usually occurs when businesses move their application database from an on-premise server to a cloud platform. Any benefits reaped from the migration—such as lower operational costs, enhanced security, and reliable performance—are merely byproducts of the target environment.

Modernization, on the other hand, alludes to a systematic act of bolstering the legacy system with significant capability improvements primarily within its native environment. Any plans on relocation would only be viable if the move would offer substantial enhancements in functionalities. Examples of modernization include a website redesign for better user experience, system updates for additional features, and integration of new languages, libraries, frameworks, and infrastructure platforms.

Transformation seeks to combine the best practices of the two approaches. This process occurs when a business seeks to move the core functionalities of a legacy system into a more conducive platform while also making incremental or sequential improvements in capabilities and designs as necessary. Transformation is, thus, a preferred solution for companies seeking to innovate their business process by restructuring their applications.

When to know your business needs legacy migration?

An outdated software program can prove harmful to businesses. However, most are often unaware that their legacy applications are in serious need of an upgrade. It is partly because most software issues start small but soon compound into a bigger, more recurring problem if ignored. To nip this in the bud, you need to watch out for several signs that indicate this underlying problem.

Expensive maintenance costs

System maintenance takes place to rectify faults and hone software performance to meet business expectations. However, over the years, the hardware equipment that underpins this system will undergo its natural wear and tear, which will require more resources to fix down the line. Significant modifications to the software also affect delivery outcomes—progressively costing more money to operate.

Migrating your legacy application to a cloud environment, for example, will solve this problem. It will help you offset the costs incurred for maintenance, infrastructure upkeep, and licensing. Most cloud platforms also operate on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing you to save more on overheads.

Limited functionality

Software innovations have made significant headways in the last few years—propped up by the demand for more seamless digital services and interconnectivity among devices. Newer technologies and systems are designed with better compatibility across platforms, mainly to keep up with the rising data consumption, which some have estimated to reach 2.5 quintillion bytes each day.

As new technologies are proliferating at a rapid pace, legacy applications will surely lose out in terms of market outreach, accessibility, and functionality. To seize new market opportunities, businesses need to consider migrating their systems to better platforms.

Software inefficiency

Legacy systems are generally slow. It also takes up more resources to function, such as memory, processing power, disk space, and in some cases, more costly hardware requirements.

There are many reasons why an old system becomes bloated. It might be due to intrinsically limited storage and disk space. Software deterioration is also a common culprit plaguing the outdated business system—induced by a drastic environment change, lack of maintenance, improper installations of software applications, and unmonitored coding errors. If left unabated, all these issues can cause severe downtimes in your business operations and slow down your staff productivity.

Vulnerable data security

Outdated technology is more susceptible to cyberattacks as compared to newer systems. The main reason is that such technology presents more security loopholes for hackers—who likely wield more sophisticated tools—to learn and then exploit. The increasingly scarce resources coupled with the inevitable absence of vendor support to patch these system vulnerabilities also contribute to this problem. This suggests that no preemptive measures are sufficient to protect your system from an attack unless the business moves to a more advanced environment.

Regulatory non-compliance

Most older systems predate the enactments and amendments of current data and privacy laws. For example, the GDPR passed by the EU only came into motion in 2016, and the HIPAA Omnibus Rule became effective in 2013. As a result, these systems aren’t well-equipped to deal with the complexities of newer data requirements and compliance. Moreover, they require direct supervision and manual updates to be up to par, and such approaches do not necessarily rule out clerical errors.

Moving to a well-supported system is part of the growing pains of conducting business in an increasingly digital world. But with the right technology partner and proper planning, it doesn’t have to be. Asahi Technologies has helped numerous businesses modernize their processes and jumpstart their digital transformation with the right software solutions.

Need to migrate your legacy system? Reach out to us with your development inquiries to get started.

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