Bringing IT Department into Analytics Decisions: Seems Reasonable

August 25, 2020

Woe to the company that implements a data analysis solution without consulting its IT department. That is the moral of the IT Brief write-up, “Extracting Insights from Data Requires More than Just a Pretty Dashboard.” A slick dashboard is nice to have, and it can offer non-technical workers the comfort of pretty graphs, projections, and generated reports. But what happens when users do not understand the data that underlies these results? Contributor Steve Singer writes:

“If you’re not sure where your data comes from, or how clean it is, you can’t trust the reports you generate from it. In some cases, if you don’t know what you have, you don’t even know how to ask the right questions. Somehow, we all have to get smarter about our approaches to all the data in our organizations and our development of the skill sets needed to capitalize on dashboard analytics. … In some businesses, decisions on dashboard purchases and deployment are made with little or no consultation with the IT department and data specialists. No one carefully considers whether the stores of data are in a suitable form or location to support the new tools. All too often they are not. Business decision-makers then find themselves disappointed when the tools fail to deliver the benefits they expected. Avoiding this scenario requires business units discuss their objectives with IT so that together they can decide on the most effective products and approaches. Data specialists must be able to assess whether tools are fit for purpose and able to be linked to the organization’s existing IT infrastructure.”

A company’s IT department is (or should be) a wealth of technical expertise at decision-makers’ fingertips. Singer offers four tips for working together to make the best choices: Begin with a clear plan that defines objectives, then decide whether infrastructure changes are needed; examine data sources and stores; establish a trust score for available data; then, and only then, select the appropriate dashboard or toolset. Though such collaboration would be a drastic change for some companies, it is well worth the effort when data projects actually product the desired results. That beats flashy but meaningless graphs any day.

Cynthia Murrell, August 25, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Analytics, Business strategy, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.