The Journey to Data Fluency - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 186

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make
decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous
mistake. Decisions are made at every level of the organization, beginning
with individual professional contributors and frontline supervisors. These
apparently low-level decisions are extremely important in a knowledge-based
organization. 3

Senior leaders in your organization may make the so-called “big strategic”
decisions, in effect choosing the path to travel down. But the speed with which
you travel toward your goal and stay on course when distractions arise—these
decisions are controlled by your front-line staff. We want to empower nurses,
teachers, administrators, marketers, and salespeople (as well as data analysts)
with the language of data.

This belief that data can inform better decisions throughout an organization
is part of our motivation. There are other foundational beliefs that have fueled
this topic.

Data needs to be formed into targeted, purposeful solutions to be of use
to most people. The common practice of delivering a general purpose ana-
lytical tool to end users and expecting something useful to happen with it,
typically results in little added value. People are busy with their jobs. The
last thing most information workers have time for is to learn how to use a
new analysis tool, figure out what data might be relevant to them, and dive
deep into a data analysis exercise. There is no
scale or leverage to such an approach. Before
adding this burden on people, the data prod-
uct authors (Chapter 5, “Data Authors: Skilled
Designers of Data Presentations”) should take
time and thoughtfully find the right data, the
right chart, and the right message to provide
the end users with a helpful solution. It is the
difference between throwing someone an
anchor and throwing them a lifeline.

Tools

Leadership

More data

Commu nication

People and Skills

We have also made clear our belief in people
over technology (Figure 8-2). There are many
suitable technologies for capturing, managing,
manipulating, and presenting data. Better tech-
nology or tools is seldom the problem. Actually,
many of the data challenges that required large

Figure 8-2: People over technology