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How old spin becomes new

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This week a longtime consumer of news, blogs, articles, whitepapers, and other content issued by the data industry said this to me.

After reading stories about big data and data quality for years, I think you’ll agree that everything [the data business] has wanted to say, they’ve said. They’re just trying to put new words and spin behind it.

Yes, but why? Is this the old stuff that all the issuers of old spin know by now? Are they like a geezer who’s forgotten he’s told the same joke for years? Or do they hold their noses, hoping that no one notices? After all, the “old stuff” is still current stuff, even though it’s not as much fun anymore.

A good way to make it new is with stories. It takes work, but if you ask around long enough you can usually find a story to make the old joke sound fresh again. Old stuff doesn’t have to be boring.

Andy Cotgreave on data without emotion

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Tableau senior technical evangelist Andy Cotgreave
Tableau senior technical evangelist Andy Cotgreave

Tableau’s senior technical evangelist Andy Cotgreave has boarded the data storytelling wagon. Actually, I don’t know how long he’s been there, but an article he wrote caught my attention today. He says that data without emotion is “worthless.” I agree!

Consider also the terrible Syrian refugee crisis affecting the Middle East and Europe. This tragedy had received a lot of attention from data journalists (e.g. The Economist back in Jan 2013), but the public didn’t truly engage until we saw the shocking photo of the drowned toddler on the beach. The impact of that single photo transformed public awareness in a way thousands of charts in news stories had not.

Does this mean our efforts with data are always doomed to be ignored? No, but it does mean we need to focus on making our data connect with people. If we want to drive change, we need to bring in emotions, narratives and the personal.

His passion and his lessons for data mongers makes it worth a read. Read the rest on Linkedin.

“BI for the other 80 percent” at Information Management

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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.

See the Information Management column here.