Data Analytics: The “art” of the Narration

“Data is the new oil”, this saying comes from a man who has achieved immense recognition from people all around the globe; Mukesh Ambani.

In the 21^st century everyone uses google for everything from searching jobs to music to their kid’s science projects. While using Google there are always recommendations mentioned which tries to match with what you are looking for, ever wondered how they are able to do that. Most of the results meaningful are found in the first page itself and very rarely people change pages. Is Google Intelligent? Yes, of course it is. Google collects data of every search being done and based on the links viewed it verifies and shows the optimum results. Google has its own tool called ‘Google Analytics’ where it reports all the recent searches done in the past day or week. It is a kind of descriptive analytics to tell what happened. Narration done through visuals is a better way to communicate and explain those results to “non-analytical people”.

Collecting Data from diverse sources is relatively easy than earlier times due to Digitization, but the main challenge lies to showcase the Data. An analysis is termed as good if they are able to convert those numbers into business sense. Something which the organization can relate to. Turning Raw data to Meaningful idea’s. The amount of resources spent on collection and storing data has reduced significantly and now organizations are swamped with the amount of raw data but they have no clue what to do with it. The organizations are not able to focus on what part of the data is more important and what can be overlooked. It is the skill of the people that makes the difference. Their way of approaching the data, to visualize the pattern and relationship between data, to interpolate or extrapolate and finally, to find solutions for their Business needs and requirements.

Data can be misleading and it often requires the right question to be asked at the right time. It should be realized what distinct types of results this data can produce so while presenting the data or is often termed as “storytelling” you must be aware of the story you are going to present or probably it won’t be a good one then.

The best decisions come from insights by informed data which lays the foundation of a data-driven organization 

Huge information which the organization have needs to be smartly eliminated one by one depending upon the data which is required by the organization and is going to affect them. While presenting the Data never show any type of analysis done through different tools such as R or Python or plots formed, instead be focused on showcasing simple visuals to represent the outputs and trends and their relationships. Also, the nature of the question can be modified with such as instead of finding why a product is not successful in the market, we can look for what other products have in better than the product which makes those products more successful. This type of modelling focusses on the pattern of behavior of the person. While presenting the data to the company the story told should begin with results and the details of the report analytically should be mentioned for the footnote of your report.

As organizations look forward to finding a solution to the increasing complex challenges, Learning to answer bigger questions using data analytics, having better insight and ability to answer and present valuable decision, and focus on quality of the story told rather than giving a picture of the data which has no meaning to the organization. It is always a good thing to understand the unusual ways to tell a story rather than knowing just one.

Ms. Priyanka Gupta

Assistant Professor

Department of Information Technology