Beyond the Data

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Ep 31 - Tricia Duncan - Implementing Data Viz in Organizations

Beyond the Data

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Episode Summary

As analysts and “data people” we often see all the amazing things that are possible with data, data science and data visualization. We research new tools, new technologies, and new approaches.

But we often work for organizations who are “stuck in their ways”, content with that excel table instead of a sankey diagram. This can be frustrating when you SEE the possibilities, but you can’t convince anyone to move in a better direction.

So what do you do? Is it you? Is it your organization? Is it the leadership?

In this episode of Data Able, we talk with Tricia Duncan who has been consulting on Tableau, Data Visualization, and new approaches for over 6 years. She’s worked with small, mid-size, and fortune 500s all over the midwest to help them implement data visualization best practices and truly “modernize” their approaches to analytics.

As someone who has seen all sizes and kinds of organizations, we were interested to see what kinds of roadblocks existed. Is everyone as averse to modern BI and visualization approaches, or is it just a select few?

What Tricia has seen, leads us to beleive that this is a common problem, not limited to any single team, industry, or size company.

One of her stories revolves around a Chief Marketing Officer who wanted to see some new marketing numbers. Tricia saw the opportunity, built an amazing dashboard, and was met with confusion by the CMO when delivering it back.

While her dashboard was likely “better” than what the CMO wanted, it didn’t match the intended ask. The valuable lesson Tricia (and we) learned was that its better to deliver on the ask, and “slow-feed” people a more visual approach. Give them a little bit more each time they ask for something. Getting them from 1 to 2 on the maturity scale is far easier than trying to get them from 1 to 9.

Check out the whole episode for more great tips on how to help your organization improve their analytics maturity!

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