I read a few interesting articles around Analytics/ data and some interesting takeaways. These articles could perhaps point us in the direction of some salient points to remember while we engage / present findings to our clients. The Narrative along with visual analytics—can be an important & a productive way to communicate analytical results to non-analytical people. Analytical orientation is as much about aptitude as attitude.Here are some important phrases/ para from the articles to substantiate the point…
Captured is an interesting framework for understanding the different kinds of stories that data and analytics can tell. The pre-condition here is really what kind of story one wants to tell.
Practically speaking, there are four key dimensions that determine the type of story you can tell with data and analytics:
Time: Analytical stories can be about the past, present, or future. The most common type of analytical story is about the past—it’s a reporting story using descriptive analytics to tell what happened last week, month, quarter, or year. By the way, most visual analytics stories are also of this type. They’re not the most valuable form of story, but it’s undeniably useful to know what happened.Stories about the present are most likely to involve some form of survey—an analysis of what people are currently up to. Stories about the future are predictions; they use, of course, predictive analytics. They take data from the past (it’s hard to get data from the future!) to create a statistical model, which is then used to predict the future. Quants create prediction stories all the time—about what customers are likely to buy, about how likely it is for an event to happen, about future economic conditions. These types of prediction stories always involve assumptions about the future.
Focus: Are you trying to tell a what story, a why story, or a how to address the issue story? What stories are like reporting stories—they simply tell what happened. Whystories go into the underlying factors that caused the outcome. Howtoaddress the issue stories explore various ways to improve the situation identified in the what and the why stories. A really complete story may have all of these focus elements.
Depth: There is also a depth dimension to these types of stories are typically long, important, and expensive, so getting stakeholder buy-in is critical if you plan to reach the end of them. Ad-hoc investigations to find out why something suboptimal was happening might help but may point the audience in the direction of deeper challenges.
Methods: Finally, there are different types of stories based on the analytical method used. Are you trying to tell, for example, a correlation story—in which the relationships among variables rose or fell at the same time—or a causation story, in which you’ll argue that one variable caused the other? In most cases, doing some sort of controlled experiment is really the only way to establish causation.
Remember: Data won’t get you standing ovation; stories will. Stories inform, illuminate, and inspire. We should all make an attempt to tell them to our clients…
