September 2021CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9felt that their companies were data driven, and only 23 percent of their executives reported they were themselves comfortable accessing or using data from their tools and resources. To make matters worse, the same survey reported 37 percent in 2017 and 31 percent in 2019 for the last metric, highlighting that apparently the confidence of executives in their own data-driven decision-making abilities has been decreasing over the past four years despite increased investments in corporate data, analytics, and AI capabilities. Considering that the ultimate purpose of data and analytics is, in fact, improved decision making, this is an eye-opening statistic. While operational functions seem to increasingly benefit from data- and AI-driven tools, it is the strategic decision-making suite that seems to be left out.So, what went wrong?The answer is multi-faceted but ultimately comes down to making the data, information, and insight not just accessible but consumable, tangible, and actionable to the involved stakeholders.Let's revisit the introductory story:· The analytics team took full advantage of the available data, analytics, and AI capabilities to pursue the insight requested. However, in communicating the results, they took the shortcut to include and present everything they knew, rather than translating it into what the target recipients, Chuck, the higher-level decision maker, and other members of his executive team,needed to know to make their decision. The analytics team designed for their own comfort rather than their audience's benefit. This resulted in information overload caused by an abundance of available, possibly relevant, yet likely not necessary information, distracting from the main insights.· From a data visualization perspective, the analytical team repurposed the graphs, charts and tables from their analytical tools and workflows, possibly to gain efficiencies. They did, however, overlook that data depictions for analysis must be designed very differently than data presentations for communication. Analytics-focused data visualizations are aimed at maximizing the discovery and recognition of insight. Visual communication, in contrast, must be aimed at maximizing consumability, knowledge transfer and trust. While for analytical purposes perceptual and cognitive aspects dominate, for communication it is data-driven storytelling that must be emphasized.· Similarly, PowerPoint is not a tool for creating reports but a presentation tool, assuming it to be narrated by a presenter. Far too often, PowerPoint slides and similar presentation decks are being overloaded with information, which reduces the effectiveness of the communication and the intended knowledge transfer.· In preparing the presentation, the analytics team also ignored the human limitations when it comes to information processing and retention: Study results have varied over the years but there is consensus that the human attention span can be as low as 7 minutes up to 12 minutes depending on the number of distractions in the environment. There is further scientific evidence that our attention span has in fact been decreasing over recent years with the explosion of digital distractions in our work environments. What does this mean? Using the rule of thumb of two (2) minutes per slide for effective presentation, then a presentation should not have more than six (6) informational slides. Or, to put it differently, after six (6) slides you are running the risk that your audience is losing its attention, so that you should try to ensure that the most important messages and insights are within those first slides. This assumes that slides are not too densely populated: From cognitive psychology we know, e.g., that humans cannot keep more than 7 +/- 2 chunks of information in their working memory at any point in time. Keep that in mind when you add information to your slides.· Finally, the fact that the presentation of findings was static and "pre-canned" limited the audience's ability to ask farther-reaching questionsand to engage in a closer discourse with the presenter(s), forcing the decision-making process into a time-consuming loop of recurrent, multi-week question, analysis, and presentation cycles.L. Miguel Encarnação
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