How can data teams help business teams understand the value of data-driven insights?

?? Aligning goals is crucial for impactful data insights. ?? Objective Clarity Understanding the precise business challenge ensures tailored data solutions, enhancing decision-making efficiency. ?? Feedback Loop Iterative discussions between data and business teams refine insights, making them more relevant and actionable. ?? KPI Alignment Identifying and agreeing on key metrics is essential for measuring success and driving strategic decisions. ?? Achieving mutual understanding of goals between data and business teams enhances the value and applicability of data-driven insights.

Ensure that data teams and business teams are on the same page regarding the objectives and outcomes of data-driven initiatives. Establish clear goals and expectations to drive alignment and collaboration.

Translate data insights into compelling stories and visualizations that resonate with business stakeholders. Use charts, graphs, and narratives to convey key findings and illustrate their impact on business outcomes.

Telling a great story or showing a great plot are nice, but when you're talking to business partners, the most impactful thing you can share is a number. Just one: how much value are they losing, by not leveraging data-driven insights? The best story you can tell is how they're missing out on free money. And the best visualization of that is a big price tag, for example "$XX missed revenue". That number is a story and a visualization, all on its own!

Offer guidance and feedback to business teams on how to interpret and apply data-driven insights effectively. Share best practices, address questions, and provide support to facilitate their understanding and utilization of data.

Empower business teams with the knowledge and skills needed to leverage data-driven insights autonomously. Offer training sessions, workshops, and resources to enhance their data literacy and analytical capabilities.

- I suggest ?? organizing regular showcase events or meetings where data teams present their projects, insights, and impacts in a concise and engaging manner. - ?? Creating success stories or case studies that detail how data-driven insights led to positive outcomes can be a powerful tool for communicating value. - ?? Foster a culture of recognition where contributions from both data and business teams are acknowledged. - Making the work of data teams visible and celebrated ?? within the organization not only educates others about the value of data but also positions the data team as a key player in driving business success.

Recognize and celebrate successful implementations of data-driven initiatives within the organization. Showcase examples of how data insights have driven positive outcomes and added value to the business.

Continuously assess and refine communication strategies to ensure ongoing engagement and alignment between data teams and business teams. Foster a culture of data-driven decision-making throughout the organization to maximize the impact of data insights on business performance.

I once found a business process, an agent-customer matching process, that could easily benefit from data-driven optimization. In this situation, I could have gone directly to the business leaders and "told a story" to get attention for the project. Instead, what I did is go to the data warehouse, find some help collecting relevant data, and frame a small data science problem. With this dataset, I was free to perform a comparison between the current state (conversion rates) and the ideal state, even using sub-optimal techniques like rule based systems. Then, when I went to "tell a story" to business leaders, the story was how much better business would be! And that's an easy sell.

Language... is paramount. I am not talking about finding the right technical or professional slang, I am talking about context. In order to achieve a direct relation between the impact from data insight and business, we must understand how the business mind works and through that relay the information of the power of data in chances won and, especially, chances lost for the customers, clients, and the company in general. Remember, humans are more averse to losing than we are attracted to winning. This is a business after all.