Creating Stories from Data

Sherlock Holmes said “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”

I couldn’t agree more.

In Holmes’ time, data was not as prevalent as it is now. Information was accessible to far fewer people and even fewer were using that information in constructive ways. Using data to aid critical thinking was the domain of scientists and engineers, inventors and academicians...and fictitious detectives. What was, perhaps unfairly described as the ‘learned’.

Today, data is accessible to anyone who can readily pipe the internet into their home, office or school. And there’s lots of it. Which sounds like progress of a kind. Or does it?

Because certainly, a person can die of thirst in a desert or can equally drown to death in the middle of the ocean. Too little is just as bad as too much; a conundrum that human beings still need to master in many walks of life. The desert and the sea are very good analogies for data. In both cases, the answer is navigation. The ability to navigate them effectively is how we survive and thrive. And data is no different to the desert or the sea in this respect. But it is also very different in other ways. Because when it comes to data and business, it is not just about navigation. It is about telling a story.

The more data there is available to us, the more we need to be able to remove that which is not useful to our purpose. That doesn’t mean we delete the data we don’t need - after all, we may need it for another purpose later on. Accumulating data, in and of itself, is a good practice. Data Literacy is the skillset that we need to be able to embed and nurture. There are lots of Data Architects out there and they are critical to an organisation’s ability to manage data. But Data Architects are skilled at Data Organisation (storage, structure, relationships, movement etc). That is not the same as Data Literacy.

So what is Data Literacy?

Data Literacy is the ability to understand which data points (individual data entities or data trends) should be used TOGETHER to tell a story. When presented with a business problem, data literacy will mine the full breadth of the available data and figure out which data points, when combined and trended together in the right way, drive the decision (tell the story) that will solve the business problem.

Many clients ask if there is a generic use case or case study that they can use to apply the concept of Data Literacy to their business. Not really. Every organisation is unique. The way in which they sell to and support their customers is also very unique - even when they occupy the same vertical market or industry sector. Understanding the business and its uniqueness is just as critical as is, understanding the data in that organisation. Without that, you cannot mine the right data points, cannot derive and overlay the right trends to tell the right story to solve the business problem.

As much as a business needs Data Architects, they need people who are experts in Data Literacy. They are not just experts in navigating the data, they are experts in employing the useful data in ways that solve business problems.

I like to call them Data Curators.