Data Fluency

Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

Zach Gemignani, Chris Gemignani, Richard Galentino, Patrick Schuermann

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118851005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Modelling & Design
• Index: Computer Science

A dream come true for those looking to improve their data fluency

Analytical data is a powerful tool for growing companies, but what good is it if it hides in the shadows? Bring your data to the forefront with effective visualization and communication approaches, and let Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Communication show you the best tools and strategies for getting the job done right. Learn the best practices of data presentation and the ways that reporting and dashboards can help organizations effectively gauge performance, identify areas for improvement, and communicate results.

Topics covered in the book include data reporting and communication, audience and user needs, data presentation tools, layout and styling, and common design failures. Those responsible for analytics, reporting, or BI implementation will find a refreshing take on data and visualization in this resource, as will report, data visualization, and dashboard designers.

• Conquer the challenge of making valuable data approachable and easy to understand
• Develop unique skills required to shape data to the needs of different audiences
• Full color book links to bonus content at juiceanalytics.com
• Written by well-known and highly esteemed authors in the data presentation community

Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Communication focuses on user experience, making reports approachable, and presenting data in a compelling, inspiring way. The book helps to dissolve the disconnect between your data and those who might use it and can help make an impact on the people who are most affected by data. Use Data Fluency today to develop the skills necessary to turn data into effective displays for decision-making.

Chapter 1
The Last Mile Problem

Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Texas Oil Boom at the turn of the 20th century saw populations in Dallas double and double again in a few short years. This tremendous growth was driven by a wholesale shift of the U.S. economy and infrastructure to automobiles. The first Ford Model T left the factory on September 27, 1908. Less than 20 years later, in 1927, Ford had produced 15 million cars as supply and demand caused a massive societal shift—the United States literally drove into a new society.

Similarly, the advent and widespread use of the personal computer at the end of the 20th century led to a new boom: the Information Age. Thirty years after the launch of the personal computer, we entered a new era of big data and data-driven decisions that has been compared to the oil boom. Certainly the hype is gushing and hopes are high that data will deliver smart insights and a more intelligent enterprise.

This is the promise, but here’s the hitch: Although generations of teenagers have learned how to drive as a rite of passage into adulthood, and with it have found new degrees of freedom, we have not systematized the acquisition of skills essential to ensure data fluency. The language at the heart of the highways of commerce, now, and even more so in the future, is available to relatively few.

The 1920s and 1930s saw the advent of factories to efficiently mass produce automobiles, and generations of insight inform our patterns of consumption of this critical product. Almost 100 years later, a critical set of skills is now needed to ensure individuals and organizations are thoughtful consumers of data, and emerging skill sets are essential to produce data-based presentations and actionable data products.

It is to the development of this critical set of skills—those of being informed, capable consumers of data, and of being accomplished producers of data presentations and products—that this book is dedicated. Our goal is to help individuals and organizations understand and develop data fluency, as we contend it is the new language, the new highway, of commerce in the 21st century.

The Information Age: Driving the Need for Data Fluency

Fantastic advances in data storage capacity have fundamentally changed the trade-offs we need to make regarding what to keep and what to delete. Rather than having to carefully decide what elements of our digital reality to capture and which to throw away, we can now keep everything. We can have it all—and we do. According to independent research organization SINTEF (The Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research), 90 percent of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years.¹ With more Instagram pictures, more tweets, more history of where customers go on the web, we are rapidly growing the amount of data we can sift through.

In a sense, the raw materials for informed decision-making have never been more plentiful. Yet the promise of data nirvana still seems far off. Students, scholars, employees, and executives are often still making crude decisions based on chance, gut, or whims of the crowd. In this era of data as the new oil boom, where’s the payoff? Are we making better decisions and are we better able to understand our world? Are we driving cars or still riding horses along the digital highway?

On the ground, in the organizations we’ve worked with at Juice Analytics, people are often frustrated by their inability to effectively use data. They’ve built data warehouses, invested in expensive business intelligence solutions, and spent finite fiscal resources to hire data scientists. They’ve data-mined, analyzed, defined key metrics, and created dashboards. Despite these efforts, data is often under-used and misunderstood.

Few people, and fewer organizations, consistently engage with the data and use it to guide their thinking. Our vision is for everyone, from front-line customer service agents to senior executives, to leverage the mountain of data at their disposal. Forget the complex Wall Street trading models or IBM’s Watson computer diagnosing disease—data in your organization can and should be used in simple, incremental ways to improve conversations, focus resources on priorities, and make small, everyday decisions with clarity.

Making use of data is a problem common to organizations large and small, public and private, and across market segments. According to a study conducted by the consulting firm Avanade, “more than 60 percent of respondents said their employees need to develop new skills to translate big data into insights and business value.”²

With all the promise that data holds, and the hope that data can help us make more informed decisions, the big question is: What is causing the gap between the vast opportunity of data and the reality of organizations struggling to act on this data? Here are a few theories:

1. 1. Many people are data phobic and unwilling to engage with data to make decisions.
   While at a leading Internet media company, we witnessed analysis teams dutifully churning out detailed reports about how online content was performing while the report recipients, content managers, dutifully ignored the information. Decisions had always been made based on gut and continued despite more and more detailed data about content usage and users.
2. 2. Technology and personnel limitations constrain organizations’ ability to work with their data sources.
   Many organizations we encounter lament their spreadsheet-driven culture. Every department has its own mechanism for gathering, analyzing, and reporting on its unique data. No consistent “source of truth” exists and data analysts become indispensable because they are the only people in the organization who know how a financial model works, how to access and understand the data sources, and its strengths and weaknesses. People in these organizations wish for a technology solution that could bring all the information together and make it available to all decision makers in interactive, visual dashboards.
3. 3. Organizational constraints inhibit the effective use of data.
   In school districts around the country, superintendents often lament the lack of good data. Indeed, the Gates Foundation is currently putting significant resources into developing district level dashboards to inform decisions. Yet, critical organizational challenges remain with respect to collecting the data in a timely manner, linking data to competency and performance assessments, and engaging teachers in the process.

We believe that data-phobia, technology limitations, or organizational dysfunction are symptoms of something broader—not the root causes of the lack of payoff we are currently realizing from data. The root cause is something we call “the last mile” problem. Fundamentally, failing to use data isn’t a technological problem, but a social problem.

The last mile analogy comes from telecommunications where bridging the final few feet from the big pipes carrying gigabytes of Internet traffic throughout your city to each individual house is the most costly. With data, collecting and storing information is the easy part. The technologists have done their job. It is analytics, application, and adoption that pose the greatest challenge. Although data storage can be done en masse, the last mile is personal and often organization-specific. Revealing insights, influencing decisions, and taking action requires skill and motivation at a personal and organizational level. This is the missing link—the last mile—requiring individual and organizational data fluency.

This book is about how organizations can more effectively communicate with data—both internally and with external constituents. It is about people and the specific skills needed to be capable consumers and effective producers of data-based reports and presentations.

Data Fluency: Unlock the Potential Energy of Data in Your Organization

In many ways, data is like oil—and it is certainly so in the economic engine of your organization. Just like you can’t pull crude oil from the ground and pump it directly into your gas tank, or mold it into a plastic LEGO® brick, you can’t dump data into an organization and expect it to be useful. Creating value from data is a complex puzzle; one that few organizations have solved. Although there isn’t a simple answer (and thus why so many organizations struggle), the good news is that understanding the nature of the problem offers a starting point for our path forward. Data fluency is the path—the ability to use the language of data to fluidly exchange and explore ideas that are important to your organization.

In this book, the goal is to help you unlock the potential of data in your organization. Your data challenges have less to do with technologies and organizational constraints, and more to do with developing the capacity of data consumption and production within individuals and organizational teams.

Data fluency applies to individuals (everyone needs the skills to “read and write” and “listen and speak” using data) and also to ...