Quit barfing data!

No one likes a know-it-all. There’s just something about the incessant reminder that this person has access to a bucket of facts that on the surface look meaningful, but that you suspect are really just a passive-aggressive form of unprovable humblebrag.

But aren’t facts good? Facts supported by data even better? To quote every professional’s opinion ever, it depends.

Regurgitating data can serve only one useful purpose, which is to ensure that the audience has access to the data. Note the word data, not insight. There’s a difference here. If you show the same data to a dozen people, you'll get a dozen different interpretations. Heck, people are even bad at accurately transmitting data - think back to the mayhem that erupts during a game of telephone.

What counts as barfing out data here? Anything that doesn’t involve some sort of manipulation. This includes spreadsheets, pivot tables, basic charts, etc.

The point is that if you are making your audience work to connect the dots, then you’re just a data transmission medium (i.e. data regurgitator/barfer).

Now if you’re collecting this information for personal use, or personal analysis, then no worries. You are both the data gatherer and the interpreter. There should be no concern about misinterpreting your own insights. (Actually there should be cause for concern here too, but let's park that issue for another article.)

The risk for not getting your message across loud and clear goes up dramatically when you let the audience interpret their own results. And the rawer the data you present, the higher the risk.

But if just barfing out data for your team isn’t useful, what are the alternatives?

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators for those “in the know”) are an excellent alternative. They act as a shorthand for conveying insight, and when they have broad industry acceptance you can safely assume that they’re useful as they’ve withstood the test of time. 

The hidden secret of KPIs is that they actually convey more information than just the data. Take something simple like profit margin – its components are profit and revenue. Reported independently, these pieces of data don’t tell much of a story. But divide profit by revenue and you magically get this metric which indicates how robust the profit is. A low margin indicates that you have to work your a$$ off selling lots more to make more profit, whereas a high profit margin indicates good times ahead.

Other KPIs perform similar magic. There’s something about applying a mathematical operation that makes the data spit out its insight. A higher-order effect, if you will.

Beyond KPIs, there are even more exciting tools for the budding analyst, such as good visualization practices, statistical analysis, machine learning and <gasp> AI. 

But for the purpose of this article, KPIs are a good place to stop.

Why? 

Because you're surrounded by people focused on barfing out data!

The next time you see someone steeling themselves in preparation for a barf-stream of data, politely ask them to pause, and see if they can politely prepare a little insight instead.

It doesn’t have to be much.

Just a KPI.