Data storytelling is generated in astounding rates in today’s businesses.
With almost every aspect of life digitized nowadays. It comes as no surprise. Companies hope to harness these raw data and turn them into information to benefit their business.
Taking advantage of this information is not always as easy as it seems. Some opportunities may be missed if careful data storytelling is used to have a clearer view of the information that they have.
Hidden data or those that need a lot more analysis to bring forth.Need a few tricks and gained knowledge to uncover.
Data Storytelling is the Future
Data storytelling is simply a way to convey complex data into a particular set of audiences.
The narrative will be based on the message that the presenter would like to deliver. It may seem that after a hard day’s work of mining data and analyzing them, the presentation would be simply an afterthought.
Unlike robots or computers, humans do not have the same kind of perspective. They need to be led to the information that you wish to send them.
Humans are not supposed to, or at least used to, speaking in numbers. They prefer a story when they wish to learn something that comes from a complex background.
For instance, the CEO of a company selling electricity to the wholesale market does not want to see a series of voltages and current levels to understand how well the business is doing.
He would prefer to look at charts and graphs that indicate the profits and losses during a certain amount of time.
Storytelling is an evolutionary trait that was passed down from the first societies into ours.
It is a means of education as well as entertainment. In the olden days, elders would use stories as devices to ensure that the next generation will not repeat the mistakes that their generation has committed.
They realize that the method of storytelling itself would engage the listeners better than simply reading out the events that have happened.
In today’s society, data is generated and transformed into information every second. It takes a special kind of attention to make sure that the stories that the data tells will be conveyed properly into the listener.
Not unlike the days of old, the same stories will likely dictate the direction where generations will go to.
The Three Fields of Data Storytelling
Data storytelling is constituted by three familiar fields of expertise. That is data science, visualization and narrative.
The Mind of Data Storytelling – Data Science
If you are working in the field of information technology, or any modern business, you may have come across the words data science more often than you would have thought.
Today’s businesses rely heavily on the data thus it would make sense to polish the ways that they would gather, store, interpret, and generate it.
This is an exciting field of science that has generated as much buzz and intellectual interest as much as financial gains for its experts.
Data scientists have devoted most of their time in perfecting their methodologies.
While they may have fine-tuned the process of mining data and making the most out of it by processing in accordance with specific business needs, they may not be able to relay this information clearly on the spot.
The data they generate requires more sophistication to satisfy non-scientific minds.
The Heart of Data Storytelling – Visualization
The user experience in software nowadays is extremely convenient.
Developments such as centralized dashboards allow businesses to customize their data collection and real-time analysis in a way that would allow them to react as efficiently as possible if events should occur.
Businesses are also acclimated with the variety of visualization tools that have been made available to them for a while now.
Pie charts and graphs are spoken as a common language among executives and data scientists alike. However, without proper context, visualizations can fall victim of underutilization.
At best, visualizations would only be snapshots of what has happened if there is no explanation into how it has happened.
The Soul of Data Storytelling – Narrative
Finally, the narrative is arguably the most important aspect of data storytelling.
A good narrative would give the audience a clear strategy in decision making.
What a good narrative does is. It allows the audience to have a complete understanding of the data presented. Without actually rummaging through the entirety of the data available.
A good narrative is key to make sure that data storytelling will be valuable for the business.
Everyone Needs to Learn Data Storytelling.
As soon as your business has decided to start improving their efforts in collecting and combining data and information across your business.
The next steps that might faze even the most seasoned business people is extracting value from it.
This is a tall order considering that everything that has to do with data is not normally a cheap matter.
The data you gather can be valuable enough to push your business into the next category. It can be a worthless waste of time and effort.
Data storytelling is essentially the ability to understand data and make other people understand it too.
As companies quickly join the forefront of searching for the next data gurus. The skill of data storytelling becomes as important as the actual job description that you have.
Studies suggest that the number of data storytellers will only become more in the future.
Because of the shift of having employees with multiset capabilities. sooner or later. Data storytelling can be as vital as computer literacy.
Many data tools have been made available to the general public. Data has also become more important.
Everybody needs to learn data storytelling. Make sure that they are making most of the information brought forth by expensive data mining methods.
The more data is circulated, the more the likelihood for businesses make the most of it.