All companies have data, most companies have a lot of data.
If you look at your own company, how much of that data is visible?
Not available by navigating to your dashboard tool and opening a dashboard. But actually visible in the office, on the intranet, when you enter a meeting room, on the coffee machines display?
By displaying data to your coworkers you can tell a story about your business. That story may be written for different purposes but one thing I have learned is that if you start displaying data internally in the company, you will start a lot of conversations.
Those conversations are important, because that means people are talking about data. and if they are talking about data that means they are talking about the business in a data context. Embrace the questions coming out of those conversations!
And as a final note on the stories… no-one wants to hear a boring story. Yes your strategic KPIs are important, but they are not fun to look at every single day.
Here are my top three tips for starting data conversations in the office:
- Build something engaging, something that will start a conversation. Mix important data such as overall sales and customer visits with fun facts such as what are people buying at 5:00 in the morning or how the food purchases differs between different parts of the country before christmas.
- Use graphical elements such as maps and ways of visualizing sizes. Maps may not be the best tool to take strategic decisions, but they make a good canvas to show differences in customer behavior across the country.
- Mix and try. There is nothing that sparks ideas better than having a version 0.5 to start with. Get some data out there, don’t be afraid to release often. If something is wrong, someone will tell you.