Somewhere in the great big cloud out there, companies have data on all of us. Things we do, places we go, our choice of shampoo, the websites we browse. As often as we click the option for our data to be removed or not to have it collected, a simple fact of twenty-first century life is that data is everywhere and all around us. As a result, we live in a world where there’s a fear of data and the misappropriation of our data, whether that’s our Gmail password, credit card details, or more private and vital information.

The volume of our personal data increases day-by-day, but also so does our own storage of that data as firms and organisations. With security and legal systems in place to protect both the individual and the data collectors and storers, it’s good to know our rights and entitlements.

A brief guide to EU data laws

As a European company dealing mostly with European clients, Viur Data is directed by EU data laws, so let’s take a quick run-down on what’s happening on a European scale.

On April 27th 2016 the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was adopted across the European Union to replace the previous Data Protection Directive. With a two year transition period, it will come into force on 25 May 2018.

The older Data Protection Directive was created to regulate the growth of personal data within the EU, and is part of the Union’s privacy and human rights law. The new European Data Protection Regulation aims to align current data protection laws across all EU member states, and being a “regulation” rather than a “directive” means it does not require implementing legislation to be passed by EU member state governments and will be directly applicable.

The regulation applies when the data controller or the data subject is based in the EU, and also, very importantly, relates to any organisation based outside the European Union processing the personal data of EU residents. According to the European Commission:

personal data is any information relating to an individual, whether it relates to his or her private, professional or public life. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer’s IP address.

For EU businesses and organisations that deal with the United Kingdom, the upcoming Brexit withdrawal of the UK from the European Union will mean a new set of laws and regulations will be implemented and have to be taken into consideration, but for now must keep up to date with the increasingly tough and complex European data protection regulations. The new, stricter legislation means cloud customers and cloud providers face harsher data security requirements as the default privacy settings must be set at a high level under the new directive.

Under the GDPR, reporting of a data breach is not subject to any de minimis standard and breaches must be reported to the Supervisory Authority as soon as they become aware of the data breach (Article 31), with individuals notified if adverse impact is determined (Article 32).

Sanctions imposed include written warnings in first and non-intentional non-compliance situations, followed by regular periodic data protection audits; A fine up to 10million EUR or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater; And in some circumstances fines of up to 20million EUR or up to 4% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher.

The so-called Right to be Forgotten has been replaced by a more limited Right to Erasure. The data subject can lawfully request erasure of personal data on a number of grounds including non-compliance with article 6.1 (Lawfulness) where the legitimate interests of the controller is overridden by the rights of the data subject.

A brief guide to US data laws

Within the United States there is a lack of high-level legislation for data privacy and relatively slack regulation. Access to private data can be obtained quite easily, particularly by potential employers and the industries whose activities come under the financial regulator. However, there is no law regulating the acquisition, storage, or use of personal data in the U.S., even if the data was collected without the subject’s permission. The few exceptions to this (non) rule include several Federal bodies and issues that come under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

Very few U.S. states recognise the individual's right to privacy, with one key exception being the state of California whose legislature aims to protect the right to privacy. For example, operators of commercial web sites that collect data on California residents need to include their privacy policy on the site.

There is an arrangement by the United States Department of Commerce and European Commission for U.S. companies to comply with E.U. directives, easing relations between U.S. organisations and their European partners.

Global data problems and solutions

There is no one single global data directive or set of laws, with the levels of privacy and ownership varying from continent to continent and country to country, so it pays to keep tight reins on the data you’re collecting and to use only the most secure platforms to chart the ebb and flow of your information. Viur Data, for example, works to the highest standards of safety and security to make sure that your data remains where it’s supposed to be, and with whom it’s supposed to be. With the increase in global names such as Dropbox, Yahoo and Amazon falling victim to piracy raids on their data, exposing and risking their users, it pays to use a dashboard you can trust!

In Part 2, discover how Viur Data ensures the complete security and safety of your information.

Like all areas of life, the world of business intelligence is filled with its own trends and buzzwords. We take a look at 12 of the biggest of 2016:

Big Data

This seems to be the major buzzword in BI over the past few years, referring to the large volume, variety and speed of data gathered to reach such a point that simply comprehending the sheer amount of available data becomes a challenge to the user. Data-centric industries such as telecommunications have had large sets of data for many years, predating this buzzword, and lead the field in terms of Big Data assembly and analysis.

Cloud BI

Like all cloud-based software, Cloud BI allows users to access their data from anywhere in the world across a variety of devices, without the need to install software or the inconvenience of being reliant on one single computer to access and control it. It tends to be relatively cheap and scaleable, and simple to administrate.

Dashboards

A dashboard aggregates data into one place that can be easily updated and viewed. Dashboards can display business intelligence information, KPI (Key Performance Indicators), and many other types of analytics information essential to your business’ operations.
Take a look at some designing visualization principles to make your dashboard experience more efficient.

Data-Driven business

Organisations and companies who survive and grow in the future are undoubtedly going to be the ones who invest in BI systems to better understand tangible KPIs and advanced levels of data analytics. Anyone who sticks to over reliance on gut feelings or ignores reports will be increasingly left behind as data-driven business techniques allow those who take advantage of the masses of data out there to surge forward. Here's how data can change your business.

Data Science

Three years ago Harvard Business Review declared that Data Scientist would be the sexiest job of the 21st century. While it might not seem sexy to the average person on the street, in the business of BI great data scientists are the rock stars of the data world. In an increasingly data-driven world, for now the term Data Science remains a bit vague, but covers an array of analytics and statistical skills with clear entrepreneurial thinking and vision.

Intelligent Decision Automation

Very much the stuff of science fiction, Intelligent Decision Automation is the combination of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and automation to take aboard analytics information and make decisions based on KPIs. Right now IDA is used for simple decisions, but with AI a key area of development for companies like Google, who’ve made their own machine learning software open source, this is a technology very much in its infancy and with the potential to soon make key decisions for businesses and organisations.

Mobile Analytics

With our mobile devices becoming increasingly indispensable, the analytics provided by our smartphones and tablets are more essential and relevant than ever. In recent surveys, over 70% of respondents planned to introduce or rebuild their customer-facing apps specifically for mobile.

Personal Analytics

Wearables have become big business in recent years, especially in the fitness and lifestyle industries. Personal Analytics refers to the data collected from the health monitoring in FitBit wristbands, Apple Watch and others that track their users’ weight, heart rate and other fitness performance data. Right now Personal Analytics wearables face two major obstacles: Their high prices put off many potential users especially as most still rely on smartphone connections for parts of their functionality. Consumers are also generally are unsure about their benefit nor feel the need to measure and monitor their body functions.

Predictive Analytics

Now in regular commercial use, Predictive Analytics relies on the available data for it’s accuracy, but is used to analyse historical and current data to understand customers, products and trends better in order to spot future opportunities and risks. While this is a huge advancement in business intelligence, it’s still very much in its infancy and it’s application is not yet as widespread as claimed

Real-Time Data

As the name suggests, this is the access to analytics within moments of their occurrence, allowing almost instant reactions from organisations to their customers and events. We’re not yet at the point of 100% real-time, but it won’t be long until this is commonplace, allowing instantaneous responses, completely custom-targeted marketing and other uses of the real-time data.

Smart Data

With the noise made by all the data available out there, Smart Data is about clean, clear and valuable data which can be used effectively by companies and organisations to solve problems and improve efficiency. Smart Data lets us see the clear context and relationships between strands of data, not just their mere existence. Also, make sure you are asking the right questions when analysing your data.

Visual Business Analytics

Visual Business Analytics refers to platforms such as Viur which offer users a simple drag and drop style method of setting their analytics parameters and criteria. VBAs aggregate and standardise data coming from a variety of sources in order to unify and compare the various strands, offering users an easy way to analyse all their data and display it in a clear graphic manner.
Here's how Viur can help your business grow.

Business Intelligence is an important topic these days, yet the perception remains that small businesses don’t need to analyse their data, that it doesn’t apply to them nor bring value to their business. Those in the know are fully aware this is untrue and that the right data can help any business thrive in an increasingly data-laden world. Here are a few tips on what business intelligence can do for your small business!

Prioritise
The right data coming to you from the right analytics streams can help clear the deadwood from view, showing you where you should be prioritising your small business’ focus and resources. Are you too focused on areas that your instinct or company’s history tells you to, while ignoring areas that are now relevant? Perhaps egos or habit has the company or management focused on their own interests rather than that of the company? The right BI will help set that straight and help you prioritise what your company needs to thrive!

Organise
Streamline and organise internal systems, communications, and methods with new and relevant data that can show you what’s working and what isn’t. Be sure that your management and staffing structure is the best fit for your company, your goals, and your budget. A platform that integrates into your stock taking system will allow better control over your inventory and even indicate to you the best cycles throughout the year to stock up on specific items. The right business intelligence data will tell you how and why to organise your company, helping you to organise it in the most efficient way.

Budget
Worried about cash flow and overheads? Trying to work out if you really need to spend what you’re needing and if you’re getting value for money from suppliers, services and vendors? Discover if your cash is just going down the drain, or if you’re getting bang for your buck with the right data. Sometimes you have to spend a little (on BI) to make a little by discovering where savings can be made - and where spending more can actually benefit you in the long-term.

Research
Hiring market research companies can be a hugely expensive and a time-consuming investment, and without control of the questions being asked and with some issues potentially lost in a case of “Chinese Whispers”, sometimes it’s easiest to take control. Modern business intelligence platforms, and the vast array of information it can bring you can help answer the specific questions you need to be answered, and maybe even the questions you didn’t know needed answering. Using BI can help your small business’ research needs to grow and improve!

Business Expansion and Product Growth
Want to know which of your products and services are hitting the right notes, and where? Business intelligence analytics and data can pinpoint exactly where aspects of your business are popular and even indicate trends in geography, population and other demographic indicators to help expand and grow your business in the right places as you seek out new opportunities to enlarge your business, while reducing risk or reliance on gut instinct, and boosting profit!

Reassess and target
It’s always worth regularly taking a step back to reassess your business from a broad, overall perspective, and to take a look at the smaller and finer details. This can help not just with operations and overheads, but in helping to target your company’s products, services and marketing.

Adapt and Diversify to Market Changes
As part of your continual reassessment, you’ll learn how best to adapt to changes in the market. As the world speeds up so must your ability to adapt and move with it before you get left behind. Before that can happen, take advantage of the analytics available to grow with the market, and to be prepared before trends come and go. Anticipate seasonal changes in demand for your company’s products and be ready to move in advance, while spotting consumer patterns you may not have expected and work to the data on offer!

Improve online presence and social media
With more and more people engaged in social media, and increasing dependency on smartphones and devices to get information, watching the analytics available from your company’s social media presence is incredibly important. Learn how to target boosted posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, while understanding what your audiences respond best to. Use social media and your websites to create a loop for your users to engage with through fascinating content that they can respond to and engage with, while learning more about your actual users, and also what potential users would respond to.

Customer Engagement
Studying the data provided by your business intelligence can help improve and hone your customer engagement not only through your social media and marketing presences, but in direct contact with your customers. Whether it’s the broader view or specific customer data, improve contact with your customers and clients by having all the data relevant to them close by to offer better service to them. BI will also improve your direct one-on-one contact with the customer, allowing you to better understand their historical needs and spot upcoming trends in their behaviour.

Future planning
Perhaps one of the best payoffs for small businesses that invest in good business intelligence systems and platforms is the ability to accurately and appropriately prepare for the future, whether that’s short, medium or long term. The days of relying on gut instinct alone in planning for the future are gone, as the ability to view measurements and insights becomes essential to the growth and planning of your business today.

Investing in business intelligence will allow you to understand not only what’s happening to your small business, but why it’s happening and where it’s going. Aggregating all those strands of data through a platform such as Viur will allow you to not only see that information, but do it in a way that’s simple to understand and help making decisions faster, better and more relevant, proving that you don’t have to be one of the big boys to make the most out of your data.

The old expression goes: “A picture tells a thousand words”. Never has this been truer than today, as with the increasing loads of data available to us we collect more and more from an ever increasing range of sources. It’s important to be able to present and read this information in a clear and easy manner. Whether you’re keeping it in-house or presenting to investors or partners, do yourself and all that data you’ve worked so hard to collect a favour, and use great data visualisation.

I can’t overstate the importance of easy-to-understand visualisation systems, but if your reader or viewer can’t understand what’s in front of them, you’ve lost them, and possibly a new business partner, client or even the opportunity to streamline or optimise your own operations! Here’s our 8-step guide to making Design Visualisation work for you!
 

Keep It Simple

The number one rule of visualisation has to be Keep It Simple. Data and analytics offer many opportunities to their users, but one of those is also the opportunity to get lost and confused. Never overload your visualisation with too much information or gimmicks! A simple and measured approach produces clearer results for the user. Around 70% of the body's sense receptors relate to sight, so take advantage of this by offering clear visuals.

How we See

How the brain physically and chemically works is essential to how we process our environment and information around us. Iconic memory is the name given to the mind’s short-term buffer and processor and ensures we have a coherent picture of the world around us. This memory form is also used in the perception of visual attributes including shapes, relative sizes and basic colours.

Pre-attentive attributes & Perceptions

To maximise the power and efficiency of visualisation, we react best to intuitive, and well-known shapes, colours, movement and spacial positioning we’re familiar with. People are always more comfortable with what they’re familiar with, which is why - for instance - we all intuitively know that the “floppy disk” icon means “save”, despite floppy disks being obsolete. It’s about familiarity and intuition, and as technology and data visualisation grow and become more integrated into our daily lives it becomes ever-more so essential to work with what people are familiar with.

Right Tools

Never ignore the importance of using the right Business Intelligence tools, specifically, while easily collecting your data from a variety of sources, pay attention to how your BI solution presents your data.
Using a modern Business Intelligence solution like Viur can make an enormous difference to the clarity and readability of your data.
Your organisation’s data will be seen not only by your technical team or person directly linked with the data, but by executives, internal teams and managers, partners, investors and more. Not everyone will have the ingrained knowledge needed, so having your data presented in a clear and easily digestible manner helps the lives and jobs of everyone involved.

Setting Up Your Dashboard

Your choice in Business Intelligence tools are not just about the visual output of the data collected, but should also come down to how you set up your dashboard options. A few essential Dos and Don’ts when you’re at that stage include:

• DO use the full axis and avoid distortion.
• DO use consistent intervals to make distinctions clear.
• DO label correctly and clearly. Always use clear language and avoid acronyms.
• DO simplify less essential information.
• DO try the “squint test” when viewing your information. If you can’t view things clearly, can you still get an impression from the information displayed.
• DO ask for a second opinion - a fresh pair of eyes can quickly tells us what works and what doesn’t.
• DON’T use 3D effects.
• DON’T use more than six colours, and be very careful with the colour combinations you do select. Keep in mind visual impairment and even people with colour deficiency. Around 8% of men suffer from this, and 4.5% of the world’s population.
• DON’T change visual styles midway.
• DON’T make the user do too much work when viewing the output.
• DON’T overload the user with too much information

Visual storytelling

Great data visualisation will tell a visual story. Without being conscious of it, our eyes and brains are capable of processing complex data quickly, but images and patterns are more easily absorbed and understood.
In an ideal scenario, your data’s story should be presented in a purely visual form, without the need for text, except when absolutely necessary to clarify something. A proliferation of words or tags can confuse users and become a distraction rather than a clarification.

Psychology of Colour

Colour is essential in creating visuals that engage viewers. The world of corporate branding tends to emphasise palettes of blacks, whites, blues and dark greens, but the clever use of reds, yellows, oranges, and purples can lead to effective visuals. There are many strategies for choosing color themes, so it’s good to learn at least a little about colour psychology, the emotional reactions they bring about, and the cultural roles of colours in different parts of the globe: for instance in Western society, the colour red is largely associated with danger or aggression, while in China it is considered the colour of good fortune.

Hierarchy

Don't treat all data with the same level of importance. As with any other area of life and business, there’s a hierarchy, which should determine the visualisation's objectives through design, colours, and organisation. Even within the use of colour, remember that hues and intensities of the colours you choose play a vital role in achieving hierarchy and storytelling.

End objective

Remember, just because you have access to dozens - if not more - strands of data feeding your BI, that doesn’t mean that everything chosen to share makes sense to the viewer, unless it’s presented clearly. Ensure that your BI platform can be easily customised to help you produce and share clear, easy-to-read and understandable visualised data.

Here’s a simple truth of the 21st century: data changes businesses. Or more accurately, making sense of your data and acting on it changes businesses. If your tendency is to say, “I’m a small business. Data isn’t relevant to me”, you’re missing out on huge opportunities to revolutionise how you conduct your business.

From Fortune 500 enterprises to corner shops, data management and analysis will change how we do business, inside and out.

1. Data as an asset

Data collection isn’t just for the big boys these days. While we read reports about “big data” and it’s growing impact in our daily lives both as business owners and as consumers, it’s easy to get scared by the terminology and to do our best to avoid getting swept up by the hype. However, even small businesses generate meaningful quantities of data nowadays. Through your company’s website, social media presence, payment systems and more, even sole-traders have customer data that can be collected and analysed to offer insights into user experience, web traffic, and other behaviour helpful in business development on many levels. All you need is to develop a strategy to collect, use, and protect it.

If you always feared that data wouldn’t be for your business and fear the fight to catch up, don’t worry: It’s easier than ever for even the smallest of companies to collect data from a wealth of sources at your fingertips, and to make the most of them using platforms like Viur to analyse and make the most of that data.

Your data is an incredibly powerful asset that can help to grow and improve your business.

2. Data enabling organisations

Whether we want it or not, the companies we interact with know a lot about us already, and the depth and accuracy of that information increase month on month, year on year. From car manufacturers working with the insurance industry to monitor our driving habits, to sportswear manufacturers offering free apps that monitor how we exercise and where, along with social media outlets and every smartphone app we use generating better insights into our behaviour and needs, data impacts all our lives already, affecting what advertising we see and through which channels.

The flip side to this is that organisations and companies need to be proactive about their data systems, what they collect, how they collect it, as well as creating and updating privacy policies, and security systems to protect that user data. Most people will allow companies to gather and save their data, but transparency is a must, as is the ability to opt-out.

More than simply assisting to target marketing and advertising, collecting relevant data allows businesses to spot, and even preempt, trends, enabling businesses to make a greater impact on their market. It can help in product and service development, aid spotting gaps in the market, as well as opening new opportunities and allowing companies to understand if certain areas of their business are failing, and why. Based on this data, decisions can be taken to either cut back, shut down, or make plans to strategize and improve these weaker areas.

Your data analysis can assist not only in product development, but when to launch new products and services to market, and how to launch them. Valuable insights can direct you towards more effective marketing and advertising campaigns and placements, especially in a time where social media and internet-focused campaigns are becoming more important and effective.

Spending money and launching new products aren’t the be all and end all of data gathering. There’s much more to it than that!

3. Data improving operations & efficiency

From tracking personnel and employee performance and efficiency to assisting in human resources and hiring, data can play an enormous role in your company’s Human Resources processes. Some organisations now analyse who their employees talk to right down to the tone of voice, while others use sensors to track the movements of their staff, checking their stress levels and general health.

For operations, it can optimise delivery and sales routes, while improving internal operations many different departments allowing you to make the most of your budget while cutting back or redistributing funds in a more effective manner is another advantage.
 

4. Data improving customer experience

How your organisation sources and analyses data can allow you to improve and fine-tune your customers’ experience and interactions with your company. In the best of all possible worlds, companies will use the data they collect to improve their products and the customer experience.

Recent data from Forbes Insights reveals that 29% of executives currently using data analytics have seen a significant shift in their ability to deliver superior customer experiences, while 42% said they anticipate their use of data analytics to significantly shift their ability to deliver better customer experiences over the next two years.

As society brings more IoT connectables into our lives, from smart thermostats and household stocktaking devices to smartwatches and fitness trackers, the depth of Small Data and insights that allow companies to sell more product, more effectively and with better service grows literally on a daily basis.

Data is moving away from being the domain of your IT department while becoming an ever-evolving, increasingly important weapon in your company’s arsenal, integral to every department in your business.

Don’t get behind, as keeping up to date with your data can change and improve every aspect of how you do business.

Many companies and organisations assume that business intelligence software and platforms are costly to buy and difficult to use, but like many things in life, there’s no one single cost that can be dangled in front of customers. Your initial BI software costs vary greatly from platform to platform, from seller to seller, with further expenses coming through the deployment of the software and training users.

Sometimes it can seem that the more options you look at, the more confusing the whole scenario becomes, especially when it’s considered that many of the decision-makers aren’t experts in BI and often won’t even be the end user of the information. While the topic of data grows with importance, so does our need to understand and use it.

Collecting data can be the easy part of that process, but understanding it is a whole different game.  

So, it’s necessary to invest in a good business intelligence solution. The fear of the cost is what often stops companies from getting started!

1. Upfront Cost of Software

The initial cost of BI software is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to implementing a new BI solution. As off-putting as this can sound, don’t let it put you off as the long-term payback can lead to savings for your company. When buying software, be clear if additional licenses are needed, but also keep an eye out for those offering flexible pricing and scaling with your company as it grows.

2. Deployment Cost

Most companies’ decision makers aren’t involved directly in their organisation’s IT, so lack the understanding of deployment costs. Frequently more money is spent on BI deployment than has been budgeted for. With many traditional BI solutions there’s a need to hire the seller or one of their partners to install it; an option that’s rarely cheap. Even without this expense, with an in-house deployment take into consideration the expense in taking your IT team away from their regular functions.

Before settling on a solution, bring your IT team into the process to gauge if the software can easily integrate into your system.

If it can, this can save time and money. If not, then maybe you should look elsewhere!

3. Project Management Life Cycle Cost

If you’re not using the right BI tool, project management lifecycle can greatly impact the cost to you.

Be cautious of slow and expensive traditional project management methods.

Look for software that uses a streamlined implementation strategy, incorporating user feedback and swift deployment.

4. End User Training

Among the costs that are frequently underestimated is user training. While expensive, it’s an investment in your staff making the most of the system, as a BI platform that can’t be used or isn’t adopted by staff becomes a waste of money. Systems like Viur, with an intuitive interface and self-service tools, can minimise the cost of user training and increase adoption rates.
 

5. Administration

Traditional Business Intelligence administration has had a hugely negative effect on ROI, due to poor integrations making them difficult to administer. Costly and specialised training was needed, taking the administrator away from their regular responsibilities. As newer systems become smoother to operate and more intuitive to use, the need for specialist administrators with traditional training has greatly diminished.

6. Operations and Maintenance

The expense of operating and maintaining your BI platform can be frequently overlooked and can increase further, particularly if your chosen solution requires your IT team or an external consultant to build or change reports, customise settings and work on privacy and security issues. Without the foreknowledge of what’s required it can make budgeting impossible.

This bloated and antiquated maintenance and customisation of your system is simple to bypass.

At Viur we believe our platform should grow with you, and around your needs and processes. It’s simple to customise your dashboard to make the most of your BI, and we work with clients to improve our platform based on their feedback, meaning you don’t need to pay for costly external customisation and maintenance.

7. Connecting different platforms

With so much data at our disposal, and so much delivered into our BI world, it pays to find a platform that interacts directly and easily with a whole host of analytics feeds. It saves further costs and hassle, especially a dashboard that grows with the industry and with your specific needs.

8. Internal v External costs

While seeming pricey to set up, by bringing your BI management in-house you can reduce your internal costs thanks to becoming self-sufficient at managing your system, and by creating reports tailored very specifically to your team’s or department’s needs. It becomes more efficient than employing an external agency, not to mention cutting out a potential leak of confidential information plus the huge savings.

Today, Business Intelligence systems and dashboards are designed so everyone in your company can create their own charts. Viur is an easy to install cloud-based system that connects to your data sources in just minutes, saving you time and expense.

In no time, you’ll be working with real data, optimised for your needs in a simple-to-use, flexible and easily customisable platform. Try it free today and discover the real cost of BI with Viur.

Data is all around us and has become a key asset in business over the past few years, but it’s more than just a buzzword. It can help business owners and managers to track progress, engagement and profitability, along with our activities and how to grow or improve key areas.
Logging into a multitude of data platforms can be time-consuming and confusing, which is where dashboards such as Viur come in. They aggregate your data and present it in an easy-to-understand form, taking away the guesswork of how your business is performing in the areas you want to analyze. Here a few ways to get the best use out of your dashboard.
 

1. Monitor your business with real-time data

Dashboards can be a great way of viewing historical data, but did you know they’re also great tools to view your business data in real time? Check out your insights to immediately current trends and performance, and even to view sales forecasts, meaning you can react to new opportunities and markets quicker!
 

2. Get immediate feedback

Owners and managers want their businesses to grow faster and more efficiently. A good dashboard will make it easy to measure performance and offers immediate feedback. Check out the impact of your latest marketing campaign on sales, for instance, or which market segments want what products or services. This type of immediate feedback lets you figure out what works and lets you adapt without waiting on otherwise lengthy reports that take a long time to compile.
 

3. Unlock insights for new opportunities

The problem with individual data tools and platforms is that they can offer insight into one particular area, but using a dashboard offers you a glimpse into everything. Your online store analytics may never overlap with sales or marketing data on their own, for instance. A dashboard saves the laborious effort of compiling and comparing data by bringing all these strands of data onto one platform and offer a complete overview, including the ability to see growth opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
 

4. Improve customer relationships

With information spread across a variety of systems, from help desk to invoicing to marketing, it can be hard to make the links in the issue of customer satisfaction. Connected by the right dashboard it becomes easier to resolve trending customer issues before they become a problem. Create a customer support dashboard on Viur to monitor customer metrics such as reported issues, average response time and resolution time, and drop-off rates of customers. These metrics can be broken down even further to get even deeper insights, as you try to conquer that all-important area of customer relationships. Mastering this will help your business improve all areas of customer interaction, be it on the shop floor, online all the way to the back office and warehouse.
 

5. Optimize social media engagements

As the power of social media grows, one regular complaint from new business users is how long it takes to gain traction with it as a marketing channel. Your dashboard makes it simple to check out the impact of SEO, email marketing, and social media from your dashboard, letting you track leads, engagement and conversion rates easily. Your marketing dashboards will identify the channels that work for you and which don’t. Select the right marketing channel to match your market and their needs, so you can stop wasting time and money on non-responsive channels. Social media dashboards can monitor when you’re mentioned, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat demographics & interactions, as well as advising on what trends are relevant to you and your customer-base.

6. Get a wider view of your organisation

Can you visualise the wider view of your business? Dashboards offer an easy-on-the-eye set of charts that offer and immediate overview of your whole business or specific areas and actions. Data visualisation is not just about prettiness, but about power as they focus on and highlight the important data. Spreadsheet or reports can conceal important issues or highlights within a cacophony of drab details. Business dashboards let you understand your business’ inner workings better to know what’s working and what’s not, and keep your business healthy and growing.
 

7. Boost productivity

Business dashboards bring strands of data together, processing it and showing the results in real-time. This enables you to spend time understanding your business’ issues, cutting down on unnecessary distractions and allowing you to streamline operations and productivity.
 

8. Increase profits

Your business dashboard can also monitor revenue and cash flow, to understand quickly and easily where your business is spending, whether it's in marketing, sales or general overheads among others, and understand their impact on ROI. Cut down on unnecessary expenses and overheads, and focus on growth and seizing opportunities while increasing your profit.
 

9. Reduce the volume of individual reports

Nobody enjoys reading long reports and spreadsheets, trying to make sense of an array of figures. While your dashboard won’t replace every report, they offer a broad view and can assist in making decisions or understanding the days activities without getting bogged down in unnecessary minutiae. A dashboard will simplify your daily business life, by eliminating daily reports, freeing up your valuable time for more important matters.
 

10. Improve team collaboration

By offering your team - both general staff and management - access to aspects of the business dashboard, if not everything, they can better understand the state of the business and their role within the grand scheme of things. It can be a quick way to getting everyone onto the same track of thinking and understanding historical data as well as the goals to focus on.

Viur’s business dashboard is an easy to set up cloud-based platform that integrates with many of the most popular platforms used by small businesses, and can help you be a smarter business owner. Try it for free today and take advantage of everything Viur has to offer!

As data and the value it offers businesses and organisations gather increasing importance, its influence on how we develop our businesses grows. It’s an industry now worth billions of dollars, with everyone from mom and pop stores through to global multinationals investing in collecting and understanding their data through a variety of tools and platforms.

Recent research has shown that over 55% of senior executives and decision-makers will increase their investment in data over the coming years, and for long-established and traditional companies their fear is losing out to start-ups and tech-savvy organisations embracing big data and the knowledge leverage it offers them. Case studies in recent years also show that organisations who invest in managing and analysing their data not only increases sales and engagement with their customers or audience but substantially reduces operational costs.

Data’s impact on businesses and organisations is clearly on the up and many of the decision-makers believe investing in it will solve many of their problems. However, it’s not a one-size fits all issue, and no matter how good or complex the systems you invest in are, the answers and solutions you need won’t come unless you ask very specific and relevant questions. Asking the right questions comes through experience and in improving your own understanding of what your data tells you.

Viur allows you to aggregate and easily review and understand your data. But what sort of questions should you be asking? Get more from your analysis with our five-point strategy to asking the right questions!

1. Start with a target. What do you want to find out

While the hype means many executives and decision-makers often focus on the acquisition of data, this seems a good time and place to remind of the importance of the acquisition of the right data. There’s no point in creating volumes of data without a specific end-goal in mind, though many organisations do keep the open approach with a mind to retaining data that may have a future, unseen use. The organisation with the most data to hand isn't necessarily the one to come out on top.

Everyone agrees that data can help to build your business, improve customer and audience relations, and fine tune operations. But how? Consider your end goals and the KPIs relevant to getting you there. Clearly determining targets helps to define the questions that need to be asked, as well as putting you on the road to using the right platforms for acquiring and analysing the data.

Understanding the purpose of the data helps greatly with understanding how to read and interpret it, and how to ask further questions or identify the changes and decisions that will benefit and grow your business.

2. What are your data sources?

Your source of data naturally plays a vital role in accuracy and relevance of what’s collected to help achieve your goals. The more information you have available for analysis, the more relevant data you should be able to retrieve, particularly today when the analytics tools available are higher and more sophisticated than ever before. It’s possible to get micro levels of detail almost at an atomic level.

If you’re clear about the questions you want to ask - which you now are after reading point 1 - you can easily identify the exact platforms you need to unearth your valuable data. When setting up your BI system, be sure to select all the fields you’ll need. Consider potential future data needs by going beyond than just selecting the fields for today, allowing for gathering even more meaningful data. Double-check everything and pay attention to detail. This might sound obvious, but many projects or organisations fail to get the big picture simply because five minutes weren’t taken to double-check.

There are an abundance of data and analytics platforms out there for every imaginable form of analysis, from marketing to medical to inventory-keeping, so be sure to match the right one for your needs.

3. Know the Measures and Dimensions of your data

A key fundamental for new Business Intelligence users is understanding the Measures and Dimensions of their data, which are the most tangible aspects of data aggregation.

A Measure is data aggregated by a formula such as the average, minimum, maximum or median, resulting in a numerical value for each. Alone these measures result in information indicating how the overall process is behaving. The absence of other data makes understanding the meaning of the measure's actual value harder. Which is why we need Dimensions.

A Dimension is the breakdown of the measure, creating a context for the user to understand the meaning of their measures, such as the total number (measure using sum) of users by country (dimension). Dimensions can be strings (such as country), dates (hour, day, week, month, year, etc) or numbers in bucket form. These combinations’ context bring a more meaningful result in the creation of a single "average duration" measure.

As new measures are introduced to the dimension, new values are created offering the user further insights into their data.

4. What types of Visualization should you use?

Aggregating and visualising your data from a variety of sources into a clean and easily readable form can be hard work. One solution is to use a dashboard from a service like Viur. The right presentation of data not only presents it in visually pleasing manner, but in the right manner with simple charts and graphs making the information more attractive to the end user, and easy to interpret and understand.

Viur supports the all the most common and fundamental charts and tables, including:
Bar chart, Line chart, Pie chart, Area chart, Funnel, Scatter/Bubble chart.

The topic of visualisation is important and we’ll detail all the best options, and offer our tips to help you make the most of it in another blog post.

5. Your data’s end users

One final consideration to make when working out your strategy is to remember who is the end user and how will they use the data. Every data user, whether they're an individual or an organisation, will have different expectations and demands, not to mention different levels of expertise, understanding and skills in analysing the reports given to them.

If reports are for internal use, the user already has a head-start in understanding the information reported and the level of complexity required. Visualisation of data should be easily absorbed and actionable, so be sure they can be read and understood easily. The level of background knowledge and depth of the user’s integration into the organisation will greatly impact their reception of the report.

Data analysis isn’t there to discipline employees or attribute blame for failure but to improve performance and motivation.

Sign up for a 21-day, no-ties free trial today, and discover the advantages Viur can bring to your business.

Another week, another feature!

Our dashboards look great in big TVs, but we know you can't always be at the office to look at them.
With Email Reports, your dashboards now live in your email inbox, so you can see them on your laptop, tablet or mobile phone, wherever you are.

The Email Reports show you the state of your business anytime you choose fit. Just add your team members to the recipients list and you can all be on the same page.

Learn how to configure the email reports on our support page.

We live in an increasingly data-driven society. Data has become a word that consumers and the public are increasingly aware of, but it’s also something that can help business owners and managers improve and grow their organisations. Big Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence have become buzzwords these days, and many businesses know they need to have them, but they don’t know why, what to do with them, or what are the right questions to ask.

Data comes in many forms and from many sources, so it’s good to have a one-stop shop to view and analyse it. This is where Business Intelligence dashboards come in. Dashboards are more than a buzzword though, and if you’re asking yourself whether your business or organisation needs a dashboard, then the answer is most likely Yes.

This is where Viur comes to help you make the most of your data and get ahead of the competition.

Business Intelligence tools can benefit businesses and organisations, from sole-traders and small family-run setups, to startups, right through to global multinationals and enterprises. However, understanding data can be difficult, so it’s good to have an easy to use data visualisation solution to display the metrics and key performance indicators - or KPIs. The more data and data sources you have, the more confusing it can become to view and understand, so a solution such as Viur will provide this data visualisation in a simple, clean and effective way that you can customise and understand. You’ll gain key advantages over the competition, save time, reduce your stress levels, and increase your sales and profits, while getting a more in-depth understanding into your own operations and into customer behaviour and needs.

What exactly is a dashboard?

A business intelligence - or BI - dashboard offers a series of charts and graphs showing what’s going on in your business, ranging from sales to user behaviour, the results of an email campaign, to simply monitoring and managing stock.

In layman terms, a good analogy would be the dashboard of your car. It provides the driver with key information about his or her vehicle. Think about it. Without a quick glance to that visual data on even the most basic dashboard you wouldn’t know your speed, fuel supply, oil temperature, or even if your headlights are on or off. The dashboards in our cars have been around for as long as we can remember and we pretty much take these things for granted, but without the visualised data we could end up in real trouble on the roads. The way business is going and how data and metrics are being analysed, it won’t be long before any business that doesn't invest in a dashboard could be in real trouble; just as you would be if your car dashboard didn’t tell you you’re about to run out of fuel!

Your BI dashboard offers a visualisation of the metrics and KPIs related to your business through the various data sources you associate to it. These visualisations help you to understand your customers better, their patterns, how they use your service and products, and their general relationship with you. It can help you set performance goals and can even help to anticipate future patterns or problems before they arise. BI dashboards aggregate, consolidate and arrange the numbers, metrics and performance on a single screen.

A good BI solution like Viur includes an easily customisable interface that can be tailored to specific clients’ custom needs, displaying metrics targeted for even a single perspective or department. Viur connects to your databases, cloud services and files, and in just seconds you can start to explore your business data with simple drag and drop or with SQL queries. It enables you to put your important charts and metrics in a dashboard, and with one glance share an array of important insights with your team or with the whole world.

More than one type of dashboard

Typically, businesses use two basic types of dashboards with each fulfilling a specific purpose: analytical dashboards and operational dashboards.

Analytical dashboards

Analytical dashboards help business owners, executives, C-level and senior personnel determine future goals through insights collected over time, such as on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis. It can help them to understand what happened and why, providing the information to make the decisions to make change.

Operational dashboards

Operational dashboards are often used on a departmental level, helping customer-facing employees to monitor KPIs and other performance-related metrics, even down to inventory levels. This type of dashboard offers live information, allowing operational issues to be spotted and resolved as or before they happen.

How can a Viur dashboard help you?

Objective data offers a clear view of your business

Viur’s Dashboards have a clear user interface, helping you to very easily understand and evaluate potentially complex data through simple graphs and charts. It can be hard to make sense of the volume of data available to us, or even to know exactly what data you need to collect. Working with several data sources can be confusing, and it can be hard to use the data in any meaningful and useful way. If you’re going to effort of collecting these metrics, you should get the most of them. Viur helps you sort through all your data sources so you know exactly what’s happening in your business. What have you been doing that’s working, and what’s having no effect on customers or would-be customers. Are they repeat business? Maybe more pertinently, if they’re not, why not?

Content today is increasingly visual, and your data should be too. Wouldn’t it be great to have a clean way to automatically collect all the data into one convenient visual dashboard rather than skipping between platforms and getting confused? Viur cuts through the noise, accessing and analysing the facts in a clear manner to allow you to view it in real-time and to understand your data easily, leading to improved decision-making to benefit your business.

The Value of leveraging the right data

Along with its people, product or service, data is possibly of the most valuable asset any business has in today’s environment. Now that you’re collecting the data you think is meaningful, what to do with it? Many business owners and managers have a repository of data and metrics available to them, but don’t understand it or how best to leverage it. The right dashboard helps you overcome these challenges, as understanding it and leveraging your data can be expensive and time-consuming. A well-designed and easily customisable dashboard from Viur makes it easy to gain and understand those insights you need to help improve performance, product and service.

GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons once said, “Measure everything of significance. Anything that is measured and watched, improves.” Once you know what to watch and how to interpret it, it’s so easy to discuss and adjust your thinking to improve results. If you see a problem, you can fix it. And as Viur is mobile-ready, you can even check out your KPIs on the go.

Consolidation of data

A Viur dashboard provides real-time data analytics on one platform, saving you the frustration and hassle of switching between screens and databases, and logging on to several analytics platforms at once, losing track and getting confused as you do so. There are many BI products on the market, but many require IT expertise or specialised training just to get started, and so scare off potential users. Viur is easy to get into, but we realise that not everyone has the same level of expertise and experience we have, so we’re happy to provide personal support and help if you need it to get going.

Viur works with data from multiple sources to create a single view point, and already works seamlessly with MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Heroku Postgres, Facebook, Google Analytics, Amazon Redshift and CSV Files, with that source-base growing steadily. Your data stays with you, not with Viur. We connect directly to your data sources, and all connections are encrypted using the safest standards, meaning confidential information remains confidential.

Get value for money and improve your business performance

The price point in business intelligence dashboards can be one of the most off-putting aspects, especially when trying to fully understand the usability and ease of a platform. Meanwhile more time and money is wasted as you fight with spreadsheets, trying to create in days or weeks what Viur can do for you in just a matter of minutes.

From your provided metrics sources, Viur offers businesses and organisations easily understood, objective performance details, offering the basis for making the right decisions to grow your business. They help in understanding customer behaviour and into making informed and intelligent decisions. A Viur Dashboard aggregates relevant metrics from all your sources, and it can be customised to be opened or restricted to particular team members, departments and partners in a clear and understandable manner.

A good dashboard will not only display historical and real-time data, but will offer the user insights into both the positive and negative business performance, and show potential problems and difficulties, allowing the relevant personnel to pre-empt and tackle new challenges proactively. It’s well established that business owners and managers with an understanding of their dashboard make better decisions for their business or organisation, knowing exactly where to focus time to increase results. Knowledge is power, so the knowledge of what’s working in your business is a very powerful and deceptively simple tool to increase sales and profits.

The big picture

The Viur dashboard provides a complete overview of your most important metrics, showing the big picture of your business. Having the right data available on-demand on your dashboard keeps you informed, relevant and competitive, offering a key advantage over your competitors by keeping one step ahead of them.

Sign up for a 21-day, no-ties free trial today, and discover the advantages Viur can bring to your business.

This week we introduced a new feature that will revolutionize the way you use your dashboard.

With the dashboard filters, you can change the data that is used across a dashboard, filtering it for a particular value or date range.

You will be able to change the time interval but also drill down to narrow the scope of your data with just a flick of a switch.

Check out how easy it is to create and use filters in these two short videos:

Creating a Date Range filter

Creating a text filter from an SQL query

Viur is easy Business Intelligence.

What sort of minds can make sense of the myriad of data and analytics platforms and cloud services available to business owners today? What sort of minds can simplify and aggregate those platforms into one simple interface? Viur didn't happen overnight, but from the dedication and hard work of a team who complement each other, making sure all the right slots are filled, and the right questions are answered.

Discover the people behind Viur, making business intelligence easy for your business.

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started." - Mark Twain

Based in Coimbra in central Portugal, Viur is the brainchild of Pedro Almeida and David Custódio, who started developing the platform in 2013. Pedro has a background in the start-up world and the torrent of chaotic excitement that world brings, while David balances this with his experience in the corporate and established enterprise side of the industry. After taking the best of both their worlds to create the Viur product, building up an international client base and growing their reputation as a high quality Business Intelligence software, they hired José Monsanto to take care of UX, UI and front-end development, slotting in nicely to help them steer Viur towards an ever brighter future.

"Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard." - Guy Kawasaki

Pedro is co-founder and CEO of Viur, and came to analytics via a career that started in machine learning. Seeing and understanding the increasing importance of data and business intelligence in modern business operations, including developing a system for Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence for the European Space Agency, he saw and grabbed his opportunity, and having worked mostly with start-ups and getting them off the ground, there was no fear when it came to founding Viur.

David is Viur's other co-founder and CTO. With a background in corporate and enterprise entities, he offers Viur the experience the company requires in dealing with customers and in getting the balance right between creating an exciting new product, and in creating a product that works for the customer right from the start. David has a deep technical background, but also loves to develop products from the ground up, from concept to technical architecture, to the final consumer product.

"It's really important to us that we're approachable to the customer," says Pedro. "Most platforms have an onboarding process that's impersonal and the customer is just another 'log in', but we'll talk the customer through the process, and in some cases, we've gone to them to bring them through the setup process and get them up to speed. We don't want to be just another faceless platform. People relate to people, and when we connect on a personal level it makes it easier for everyone, and can consolidate the relationship with the customer."

Connections and relationships run deep within Viur, so when a UX/UI designer was brought in, the choice was obvious. José was hired, well known to Pedro and David not just for his professional skills and experience, but from the years he and Pedro had played in the same band, forming a deep connection and rapport. Their shared experiences and complementary mindsets bring another level of sophistication to Viur's product design and experience.

José is the unusual mix of a designer with a background in informatics engineering, meaning he has a complete understanding of the product from the inside out. "It's important almost to be a sociologist," he says, "to truly understand people in order to create a product they want to use and that's easy for them to use. If you don't understand how people behave and interact with your app or platform, you can't make a great product."

"It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious." - Murphy's Law

Start-up life is usually quite hectic, and Pedro firmly believes that "it's important to become multi-disciplinary."

"There's no such thing as a typical day in Viur", according to David. "Every day is different. The kitchen's always on fire, but that's start-up life. Typically the day starts by checking mail, resolving any issues, or implementing a new feature from our roadmap or a specific client request. Later we check in with our European customers, and as the day goes on and the other side of the world starts to wake up, we might have to offer some support to our American customers; but I might just as easily end up cleaning our kitchen or running out for stationery." Everyone pulls their weight and mucks in at Viur, even the founders.

"Simplicity is the byproduct of a good idea." - Paul Rand

The clear presentation of data is vital to Viur's users, and clarity and serenity permeates through the Viur teams' personalities. The relaxed, jocular conversation turns to their collective love of classic movies such as Blade Runner and Ghostbusters, and Pedro's preference for Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather over the film - "Though that's also pretty good!" - and modern classics on Netflix. Pedro's weakness is for House of Cards, while David and José are fans of Narcos and Daredevil, respectively. José's choice should be no surprise as our chat has already covered his love of comic books, illustration, and art, and threatens to move away from Viur altogether, when the conversation comes around to music.

Asked about their favourite bands, musicians or albums, heads are scratched. The issue isn't that they don't like music, the issue is there's too much to choose from. Pedro volunteers Led Zeppelin, and José picks Tool's biggest success, 10,000 Days. Ironically it's David, who doesn't play in the band with the other two who has the most trouble picking just one album or one musician, and reasons that, "It changes from day to day; it depends on my mood, the weather... there's just too much good music out there to pick just one band or album!"

"The future belongs to those who prepare for it today." - Malcolm X

Viur's goals are simple: To refine and improve the platform, expanding the range of databases and systems it interacts with to complement the standards such as Google Analytics, to include more niche and business-specific analytics and BI sources. Viur wants to offer businesses and customers an easy-to-use, cloud-based visualisation and exploration of their data, making it easier for business owners and managers to assess and understand their metrics in an increasingly data-loaded world.

Crude price is at an all-time low. It has been falling since 2012 but the car owners perception is that petrol prices don’t always accompany this fall.

For this analysis, I used crude and dollar CSV data sets you can find with a simple google search and my car’s consumption data set that I have used in other blog posts.

By the way, you can learn how to use CSV files in this post.

Let’s load the data in Viur and let’s see what we can do with it.

The first thing that I want to see the Crude Price evolution.

Impressive rise and fall! Now I’m going to check the price per liter to a regular car owner just like me. This is a bit more tricky because it requires calculations, so I’m going to jump in from the Drag & Drop to the SQL code editor.

SELECT  
  date_trunc('MONTH', "Date"), 
  AVG("Total price"/"Quantity") AS "€/l"
FROM "Fuelings"
GROUP BY date_trunc('MONTH', "Date") 

For us Europeans one of the things that has an impact on gas prices is the currency value. The crude price is in Dollars and the Diesel price per liter is in Euro. I have to normalize this to compare, so in the next chart, I’ll take the exchange rate into consideration to put everything in dollars. To have a tighter chart and knowing that a barrel of oil has approximately 159 liters I’ll also reduce the price of a barrel to the price of a liter.

SELECT 
  date_trunc('MONTH',  e."Date") AS "Date", AVG(e." ECB reference exchange rate (US dollar/Euro)") AS "(1€ in $US )",
  AVG(c." Dollars per Barrel")/159 AS "Crude $/l" ,  
  AVG( f."Total price" / f."Quantity") * AVG(e." ECB reference exchange rate (US dollar/Euro)") as "Diesel $/l"
FROM "Dollar to Euro" e
INNER JOIN "Crude Price" c ON (e."Date" = c."DATE")
INNER JOIN "Fuelings" f ON ( e."Date" = f."Date" )
GROUP BY date_trunc('MONTH',  e."Date")
ORDER BY date_trunc('MONTH',  e."Date") ASC

Let’s zoom in on the chart to have a closer analysis.

The crude price is more steady and the diesel price accompanies it even though it has more abrupt raises, maybe amplified by the dollar valuation. Another interesting insight is that the Dollar to Euro exchange rate mimics the crude price evolution.

Any thoughts on this? Let us know what you think in the comment box.

Viur is Business Intelligence made easy.

Every day we produce huge amounts of data that can be used by apps and other services. Personal finances, fitness apps, home control & automation, work loggers… There is an app for pretty much everything we can think of.

Some applications that we use every day allow us to export data as a CSV file. This is great because it means we can explore data with a finer detail and eventually get better insights than those that most applications give by default.

All we need is a proper Data Visualization tool that can take these CSV files and lets us play a bit with the data. 

So, let me show you how Viur works with CSV data.

For this example I’ve chosen a dataset from SpritMonitor that contains my car’s mileage and my Gas’ expenses.

On the Datasouce Configuration page let’s choose “Files”

The first thing to notice is that we have to fill in a “CSV Database Name” and the “CSV Table Name”. This is related to how Viur handles CSV files: 

Viur uploads the data from the file into a private cloud database that only the user (and team) has access to. When uploading the second file you can put it into the same database and on a separate table, so when querying you can perform joins.  

While filling the form, pay attention to the column separator, and file encoding. Please note that files exported in Microsoft Excel may have the encoding set to Windows-1250.

On the second step change the data types for each column. This is crucial to perform relevant data analysis!

The last step is just a confirmation, go ahead and hit Finish!

We’re now ready to explore the data and create some widgets on the Widget Creator page. 

Choosing the datasource that we’ve just created and dragging the Consumption in the measures and applying an Average we’ll show us the total consumption average.

6.24 liters per Kilometer (about 45 miles per gallon in imperial units). Not a bad result for urban driving in such a hilly city.

We can go further and drag the Date. This is quite interesting because the season (cooling or heating) might have an impact on the consumption. I have to get weather data and cross these values with the temperature to see if there is a pattern. If you are asking yourselves what’s that huge spike in September 2012, let me just say that I decided to check the car’s top speed…

This was just a small tutorial on how to start analysing data from a CSV file. On a next blog post, I’ll go deeper on data analysis, this time using multiple CSV files.

Viur is Business Intelligence made easy.