Two Ways

Good morning!

It's Day 2.

Let's ride.

Every company I talk with wants analytics and insights. They want meaningful dashboards, compelling metrics, and accessible data to answer their questions.

There are two ways to do this:

First, assign your business or data analysts the job of building these reports for your team. They'll export data from various systems. Then in Excel (or Python if you're lucky) they will clean the data, remove duplicates and resolve inevitable inconsistencies. The business logic is next and applied in calculations, filters, or formulas - perhaps in a shared workspace, but most often on the analyst’s own laptop. Likely exhausted from the process, the analyst tosses a few visualizations onto a business intelligence tool.

After several hours (or days) of work, the analyst presents their findings. It's great! Everyone loves it. Maybe too much. They ask for weekly updates on this report, with a few additions, and business logic changes to a particular metric.

Excited, and a bit overwhelmed, the analyst returns to their desk and shares with a colleague about what happened. After a few minutes of back and forth, it comes out that the other analyst has built similar reporting 6 months early, but using (yet more) business logic, mapped to similar different data sources.

Whose report is right? Which business rules are correct? Which data is supposed to be leveraged to answer these questions?

No one knows. But as long as a weekly presentation happens that shares (maybe correct?) insights with pretty visuals the cycle will continue.

Exhausted, the analyst returns to their desk, tries to remember how they built their report, and blocks out 6 hours on their calendar for the next week to try and reproduce it again.

Is there a better way? Of course. Let's talk about that tomorrow.

Sawyer

from  The Data Shop