On Data Viz and Data Viz Culture
ARTICLE: How to Create a Thriving Data Viz Culture"Promote the importance of dataviz, when it bridges design, communication, and data science."
"Alejandra's teammates approach her with key questions and expect a collaborative process to answer them, not a predefined chart."
- Help allocate space for dataviz *process***.** You already allot space for data science and do so precisely because you don’t yet know the data’s properties. In that spirit, give dataviz practitioners space to research, explore, and test, precisely *because* you don’t yet know what visual form will most powerfully unlock and communicate the data’s insight.
- Focus on questions, not chart requests. You’ve got nuanced insight into your own work and it’s key questions. By focusing on those expert questions and challenges with dataviz professionals (instead of leading with a chart request), dataviz tools will better reflect and support your expertise. It also helps you communicate your impact to others.
ARTICLE: Don't be Data Driven. Be Analytics Driven
We make our decisions using data
"There’s something insidious in this statement: it doesn’t recognize the hard work of data scientists/analysts. The focus is on the data, not the analyses, which is to say:
"Data-driven orgs: analysts fetch data.
Analytics-driven orgs: analysts find answers.
Data-driven orgs: hire more and more analysts/DS as “hands”.
Analytics-driven orgs: invest in infrastructure, tooling, and education.
Data-driven: “Can you pull these numbers…?”
Analytics-driven: “Can you help me think about…?”
Data-driven: Finds data that justifies management decisions
Analytics-driven: generate insights that tell a compelling story management can act on[To] help support this shift:
- Document your ad-hoc work. As a data scientist or analyst, you are the person most familiar with data, so naturally data-related requests will come to you. My default response has always been to drop a query/dashboard on stakeholders ASAP, which I’d promptly forget about. But then I’d have to repeat the work the next time I was asked. Plus, this sort of ad-hoc response just reinforces the perception that your relationship with decision-makers is purely transactional.
- Document your data.
- Set up a central place to find your documentation.