Carl Allchin - Communicating with Data: Making Your Case With Data

At my very first job in a large organization, I was assigned to a team that was preparing slide decks to report on the organizations operational performance and influence their peers and bosses. I was 22 and had never worked in an organization of more than 100 people. This company had over 40,000 people and operated in a completely alien manner to me. I sat next to the operational directors, so I had a good vantage point to see how the team worked. We compiled tables of numbers, insight, and commentary from other peoples work with data to measure progress toward operational targets, determine future strategies, and analyze where previous decisions had gone awry.

We worked with aggregated data points from reports and charts used to run the various parts of the organization. These reports were formed from other peoples work with data. I hated not being able to get to the raw ingredients of these compilations: the data. What frustrated me even more was that I didnt have the data skills to see that rawer data. I wanted to learn. So when asked about my next career move, I chose to follow the data and information back to its source, and asked to work with the centralized data team. I havent looked back since.

I havent stopped working with data, so Ive seen firsthand that the growth of datas influence on organizations hasnt stopped either. In fact, its only sped up. Data now influences business decisions and economies in ways that are often too complex to fully wrap our arms around. Harnessing data has become an important part of organizational life across all industries and sectors. Data used to be the domain of specialists, but individuals across the organization are now being asked to communicate with datawhether you are a project manager, process improvement specialist, or team manager.

Skilled data professionals are thus in high demand, but our numbers havent grown quickly enough to keep up with rapidly amassing data resources. Data work has traditionally been a centralized, specialist function, since it often requires coding in specialist languages or working with complex data reporting tools, but not anymore.

Over 15 years of working with data, those tools have changed more than any other aspect of the job. The new generation of data tools is far easier to use, with improved user interfaces and far less coding, greatly reducing the barriers to entering the field. More people are using data directly than ever before.

This is especially true when it comes to data visualization. Tools like Tableau and Power BI from Microsoft have allowed subject-matter experts in all sorts of fields to showcase and share their findings through data. If that sounds like you, youre in the right place. Learning to use these tools still requires training and support, both in using the tools themselves and in the fundamentals of data visualization.

This book focuses on the latter. It is not a step-by-step guide to using any specific tool, but you might do well to read it in combination with such a guide. This book operates on a somewhat higher level, helping you understand basic data skills as well as how, when, and where to deploy them in your work life to get results.