The Data Articulation Layer

There’s a “last mile” problem in the data world, and it’s one of the main reasons that many companies don’t feel their investments in data visualization and data science are paying off.

Kitty Kolding

A recent article by Harvard Business Review covers this issue brilliantly:

“Data teams know they’re sitting on valuable insights but can’t sell them. They say decision makers misunderstand or oversimplify their analysis and expect them to do magic, to provide the right answers to all their questions. Executives, meanwhile, complain about how much money they invest in data science operations that don’t provide the guidance they hoped for. They don’t see tangible results because the results aren’t communicated in their language.”

This is a solvable problem, but it takes a different approach. The approach we’ve taken is a human one. Not in any way divorced from technology, but very much supplemental to the wonders that dashboards, trend lines and visualizations can offer. 

We believe that visualizations are only part of the data story. The rest of the story needs to be told with words – words written by humans who have studied the subject matter, and who understand – and write directly for – their audience.  

A true data narrative puts these critical findings into context. It explains what happened. Why it mattered. What to do about it. It engages and activates personnel from entry level to the board room to understand, digest, make decisions, and take action. 

We call it the Data Articulation Layer. 

Any company can build its own data articulation capabilities. If they’ve invested heavily in platforms and meaningful data science operation, why wouldn’t they? 

To deliver data articulation services to our clients, we’ve chosen to:

• Engage teams of domain-experienced analysts who observe, study and interpret the powerful results from BI and Analytics platforms. 
• Include skilled writers who synthesize these findings into prescriptive, intelligent insights with well explained nuance, relevance and context. 
• Engage designers and technologists to create customized content containers to house the data findings and the written word together, in a way that tells the story in the size and format that is perfect for each selected audience. 

We see the last mile problem every day. Sometimes with the BI platforms themselves, who need usage and engagement to achieve renewals with their clients. When that engagement is limited, we come in to build a customized method of re-engaging their users. 

Other times our work is in support of a Chief Data Officer, who has just spent a lot of internal relationship capital to implement some very strong tools to democratize data and findings, yet that engagement isn’t happening. Users might be too busy, uninformed, or struggling to connect the relevance of the data to their own daily objectives.  

In every case, the goal is to ensure that users, colleagues and co-workers understand, process and take action based on the data. To do that the data must be synthesized, interpreted, and articulated. Writing for the right audience with words that put data in context is the answer. 

If the payoff you want from your data science operation isn’t quite there yet, consider adding data articulation capabilities – ours or your own – to your toolset.  

For questions or ideas, or to air data disagreements, contact me anytime at kitty@chrysalis.partners.