The Last Mile Problem - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 15

and it's not there! And things that I get from their team hardly look like other
information I receive from HR or my area superintendent.”
Another principal stated: “We're too busy to take the time to sit down as a
leadership team and look at the data.”
A final principal said: “We have a hard enough time as 'insiders' making sense
of all the data . . . It's not like any parents are going to understand this stuff.”
After the teachers and principals concluded their remarks, the School Board
spent the rest of the meeting arguing over one major question: Why did we
invest so much money in a system that isn't being used . . .and where do we go
from here?
These challenges, which are explored in detail in Chapter 6, are all central to
organizational efforts to create a foundation for a common interpretation of
data presentations.
Organizational-Level Producers: Insurance Company Bottom Lines
Large companies spend millions of dollars a year on healthcare claims for
their employees. Health insurance companies are responsible for explaining
where all that money went, and why premiums go up annually, despite care-
fully designed programs to make a healthier workforce. Account executives
at insurance companies have a common challenge: how to tell this story to
their customers using data.
The goal is to show increased quality of health services being offered, bet-
ter health outcomes for the employees, and lower employer costs. Telling
a good story with actionable data would result in a contract renewal. Too
often, however, these data presentations are met with boredom and frustra-
tion rather than enthusiasm. A lack of a good story line is often the result of
disjointed data points pulled from a number of databases. Significant time
is spent collecting data and then trying to compare it to national, regional,
and industry benchmarks, and often little energy is put into telling the story.
Or conversely, much effort is put into telling a good story—with little data to
back it up. Either way, poor presentations are often followed up by requests
for different metrics and more data, which may or may not be helpful. And for
an account executive trying to close a deal, a poor presentation could mean
no contract renewal this month.
Consider the challenge of collecting wellness data on 250,000 employees
from a large company, and matching it with employee productivity, wellness,