Are you effectively evangelizing your data?
By: Damjan Vlastelica
Tags: Dashboard, Analytics, Data Science, Data, Data Visualization

You may have heard, data has become a thing. The space has quickly grown, and its popularity, and interest has never been bigger.

However as in demand as data may be, you may be surprised how much excitement you will need to build for your Data and Analytics (DNA) practice, in order to effectively communicate its outcomes. Effectively evangelising your teams mission and outputs should be a key focus area, in order to give your work the exposure it needs to scale. You may not think about it now, but part of your role is to educate people on how data can be used and manage the conversation around data.

Here are some helpful hints on how you can achieve this.

Dashboards Galore.

Ok, maybe not galore. You don’t want to have too many dashboards, but those that you do should be both eye catching and informative. The primary purpose of dashboards is to automate any rote reporting that you are getting requests for. The secondary purpose, however is visibility.

Dashboards are the most immediate and visible representation of your teams work. They often will remain accessible even after your team has gone home for the day, and, as is becoming increasingly popular in many organisations, can be found turned on and displayed across monitors scattered across your office — as if on a trading floor. Given their visibility, put some time into designing them so that they capture your audience’s attention and convey the messages that have a clear, defined and valuable purpose while showcasing how data is being used within your organisation.

Go old school — and communicate analog in order to build relationships

I believe there is a lot of value in high quality, human interaction. In a world where everything is digital — a world that has vastly enabled the work that you are doing, finding ways to identify and enhance analog communication channels can be of great benefit. If you want to evangelize — there is an advantage of doing it face to face.

One way to do this is to find ways that encourage people to submit work requests or problem statements or hypothesis that they want you to address, in person, rather than digitally. This has many benefits. First, they get to meet you and your team. Second, you will find people think through questions more rigorously, when it takes more effort to submit them. A simple change like this can increase the quality of questions that you begin to receive. Lastly, you are able to begin the conversation and gain valuable context from the source straight away. The flow of the conversation may go in many directions leaving you and your counter party better informed — a win for all parties involved.

Finding little pockets of opportunities like this will enhance your teams visibility and effectiveness.

Unknown Unknowns

With many an organisation’s data growing dramatically, it is hard for the non data person to keep up with what’s available. Whether you know it or not, part of your remit is to educate people on what data is out there, and how it can be used. The more visibility of what data exists, the quicker your stakeholder’s minds will start ticking over and crafting questions for your team to tackle. Which means more engagement and visibility for you! Take it upon yourself to inspire non-tech people by making these data points known, and piquing people’s curiosity.

This can be done by featuring them on the aforementioned dashboards. It can also be done by showcasing insights from other parts of the business, so that your audience members can get an understanding of what data is being used, and which problems are being solved in parts of the organisation, other than their own

Parlez vous data?

The more people you get talking using the language of data the better. Part of a good data scientists remit (and in some organisations a completely seperate role) is to be a good data translator. This job can become easier if there are less things to translate. So take it upon yourself to periodically teach non data people about your methodology. Spend time talking about the methodology that you used, and the reasons for any choices that you made along the way — and not just the results that you achieved. Explicitly point out how the work that you have done should be used and what it means, including how it may be misinterpreted. Effectively you will be summarizing your own work — to make it more digestible for others.

So, take your role in communicating your teams outcomes as seriously as that of generating those outcomes. Make sure that you are leading the conversation as it helps shape how effectively data gets used within your organisation

This story originally appeared here