Ted Cuzzillo writes for Information-Technology:
We give business people everything. They’ve got data, and often it’s clean. They’ve got tools, and many are easy to use. They’ve got visualizations, and many of them speed things up. They’ve got domain knowledge, at least most do. Tell me: Why hasn’t business intelligence penetrated more than about 20 percent of business users?
This is a great question. So many organizations have executive leadership that says they want information, dashboards and realtime information, yet when provided to them, it goes unread. How does this happen? The answer is what most executives want is a story. They want someone to interpret the analytics and let them know what they should be looking at. The dashboards act as content for speaking points. Executives want the most important numbers at their fingertips so they can spit them out at a moments notice.
What executives want is the rest of the data to be fed to them in a story with a narrative. Here is the data, here is what we believe it says and here is what we are going to do about it. It coincides with my article Data + Insight = Action.
What executives need is all of these parts (data, insight and action) in one analysis. They need to see the data, using visualizations to make the data easier to read. They need the insight of the business experts in the form of a commentary, succinct and to the point. Then they need what action is the business going to take with this newfound knowledge. With all of this information to arm the executive, they can understand and make a decision on what to do.
To reach "The Other 80 Percent," let’s turn away from the “data scientist” and to the acting coach. “A lot has to do with intangible skills,” said Farmer. A lot also has to do with traditional story structure, which appeals to “a deep grammar that’s very persuasive and memorable.”
Storytelling isn’t a feature, it’s a practice. One practicing storyteller, with the title “transmedia storyteller,” is Bree Baich, on the team of Summit regular Jill Dyché, SAS vice president, best practices. While others talk about stories, she said, most people seem to start and end with data and leave out the storytelling art. They fail to connect data with any underlying passion. “What we need are translators, people who understand data but can tell the human story from which it arose.”
There is always an assumption that is made from an analyst that a visualization or a table of data is plain and understandable. A good rule of thumb is to assume the audience of an analysis doesn't see what the analyst is seeing. If analysts start with this assumption, they can then tell a story of why this data is fascinating. An analysis without text that explains why the data is interesting is going to fall on deaf ears. Once the analysis gets to a higher level, the executives will not have time to create the "insight" portion of the data and they will either send the analysis back, or ignore it completely. Always remember to include the data, with the insight as a story and what action is going to be taken. With this formula analysts will become more than report generators.