Clues to a Great Business Intelligence (Data) Story

I highly recommend reading Cindy Harder's interesting piece on telling stories with data.  Even though she was specifically referencing BI stories,  she does elude to doing the same with data analysis and data discovery in the article.

I was just thinking about this topic of making data discovery fun last night so this article really spoke to me.  I think Cindy is dead-on when she reminds us to make sure we engage our audience with a storyboard around data analysis that makes the user want to know the ending.

This is often forgotten,  albeit challenging, with regard to presenting data analysis.  I struggle, at times, with how to make presentations interesting.  And let's face it snazzy icons in a PowerPoint deck does not count as entertaining.

What Cindy emphasizes in the article is to engage users with data stories using these five basic principles when writing your data story:

1. Refresh your data often


2. Build a complete dashboard, but don't over complicate it (tricky and important!)


3. Encourage further investigation with data discoveries (my favorite!)


4. Analyzing data is fun, not just a job


5. Draw conclusions with your analysis that are accurate and meaningful

To me, points 3 & 5 are the real important concepts here.  I think you can facilitate further investigation with meaningful results.  And the key lies in the term meaningful.  To do this effectively, you need to bear in mind your audience.  Meaningful to a controller is not the same as it is to a DBA.  However, data discovery activities can support both these roles and you need to be sure to deliver something they care about in your story.  I think, if you do, that individual will be compelled to conduct further investigations which is where Cindy's point of being accurate is important.  Make sure you are on point in your analysis!

Read the referenced article here:

Clues to a Great Business Intelligence Story | Visual Data Group.

Check out Cindy on Twitter: @CindyBHarder