How can business survive without data? Well, 80 percent of eligible users, according to most surveys, do seem to go without. The industry salivates in anticipation of someday colonizing that territory, and it shudders in frustration because they haven’t done it yet.
That topic came up last summer at the annual Pacific Northwest BI Summit. I’ve written here before about the session led by industry icon Claudia Imhoff and IBM vice president Harriet Fryman. Now I’ve published a column about it to a bigger audience at Information Management.
The column offers a strategy: storytelling. Humans are wired for it. The industry might as well take advantage.
The trick is to learn how to do it. Or even before that, the trick might be to accept storytelling as legitimate business practice. Though it’s widely practiced in the C-suites, those below them, the middle managers — so prone to insecurity — seem queasy about it.
Yes…but the storytelling needs some meat. Discovery of novel, timely and actionable facts. The weeks to months response times of most stack tools just doesn’t cut it. And, the other 80% can’t afford them.