Wed 30 / 09 / 15
Management Information goes to Hollywood (Part 2)
Thom Naylor, Managing Director of Excellent Solutions, after discussing the importance of trusting your audience in his previous blog, now asks "what are you trusting them with?"
As any decent Hollywood aficionado will know, any sequel must be bigger, bolder, have better explosions and, ultimately, be not quite as good as the original. I will try and satisfy all of those criteria…… except for the explosions that is, this is a data blog, after all.
So, believe it or not, you are now ‘trusting your audience’ after being incredibly impressed by my previous blog instalment. The big question now is, “what are you trusting them with?” Well, if I firstly transform this question into “what shouldn’t you trust them with?” then I can draw inspiration from amongst the words of the man-eating plant (Audrey II) in Little Shop of Horrors – “Feed me! Feed me now!”
The challenge with providing high quality, informative and insightful MI is that the business becomes hungry for more. Without control, it can get to the point where you are providing the business with MI just for the sake of satisfying their hunger. As the business consumes more MI at an ever increasing rate you become more desperate to satiate the hunger and start providing MI that is no longer informative or insightful – you can already see where this is heading?
It reminds me of a comical allegory I once stumbled across (I would give credit where credit is due but as far as I can tell it originated somewhere in the US in 1924). The version I heard goes like this;
“A police officer sees a man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and goes to help. The man explains that he is looking for his car keys, but after helping for a few minutes without success the policeman asks whether the man is certain that he dropped the keys near the lamppost. “No,” is the reply, “I lost the keys somewhere across the street, but the light is much better here.”
Often, in our desperation to “feed the monster” we forget about what is important and instead provide whatever MI we can lay our hands on. Much like the man in the allegory, we don’t take our time to look where we can find THE answer, we just look wherever it is easiest to look. Based upon this understanding, below is a little bit of guidance that should help to put you back in control of your MI.
Firstly, in this two step process make sure you get the steps the right way round…..
1. Consider what MI would be insightful.
2. Work out what data you have available to support building that MI (and if you don’t have it available, are you able to make it available).
rather than…..
1. Work out what data you have available.
2. Decide on a pleasing format in which to present that data.
Secondly, make sure you ask yourself the “why” questions (see, ‘Children make the greatest data analysts’) before your audience get to ask them – that way you are prepared and are ensuring your MI is adding value.
Finally, (and this will be the end of my superficial and tedious links back to Hollywood) consider your role as an MI expert in the words of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “I say how much, I say who, I say when, I say who”.
For more information, please visit the Excellent Solutions website.
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