Data Alone Is Not Enough §
Highlights §
- better data and better analytics is the wrong goal. Reporting is a gateway drug, but more than reporting, analytics, and visibility alone will be required to drive change in a company. We need to focus on being more efficient, on being more profitable, and on building better organizations- on driving actual organizational change. (View Highlight)
- Reporting, visualization, and analytics are helpful because, when done exceptionally well, they can help you understand where to direct your focus. Still, analytics, in themselves, do not drive changes. Knowing that your conversion rate is going down does nothing to improve your conversion rate. (View Highlight)
- Data initiatives are too focused on democratizing access to information and not focused enough on driving business impact (View Highlight)
- To build relationships with stakeholders and domain experts who are doing the work, data teams must do a significant amount of reporting. This reporting work is fine when it’s a part of toll-paying to eventually move up the data team maturity scale into insights and predictions. (View Highlight)
- Still, with so many data sets and across many functions in a company, many teams never break out of their reporting roles. (View Highlight)
- if data is wholly divorced from the work of the business, then reporting is just a distraction. (View Highlight)
- While data and reporting are important tools for these professionals, their time would be better spent identifying target outcomes instead of just asking better questions about data (View Highlight)
- Better visibility is rarely the answer. When you do the work day in and day out, you already have a sense of the answer. In all my years of working in data, I’ve seen over and over that data is usually only confirmatory and is rarely groundbreaking. (View Highlight)