How Organizations Struggle with Data Fluency - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 36

data, more reporting, and more metrics. An important part of its services is
to deliver annual summary reports to its clients about the costs that affect
health benefits. The company's analysts would spend thousands of hours
preparing detailed PowerPoint presentations, chock full of hundreds of “key”
metrics. When it came time to present to its clients, the discussions quickly
dove deep into the details. Important recommendations were lost in a pile
of minutia. The first step in recovery is to recognize you have a problem. Our
client knew this volume of information wasn't good for the data product
authors or the data consumers.
RepoRt pRolifeRation and the data fluency fRamewoRk
Report proliferation may mean you have a lot of people interested in data
but are having trouble defining what's important. Conversely, you may
have people less interested in data but who need reports nonetheless to
validate their activities. In either case, useless reports distract attention and
prioritization is essential.
BALkANIZED DATA
Organizations which design systems . . . are constrained to produce
designs which are copies of the communication structures of these
organizations.
Conway's Law
Departments in an organization can easily become independent silos, operating
with their own set of norms, conventions, and terminology. This impacts what
you can do with your data and what you can understand. Almost 50 years ago,
computer programmer Melvin Conway observed a similar issue with software