August 2015
Beginner
300 pages
7h 29m
English
Content preview from Creating a Data-Driven Organization
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 5. Data Analysis
If you torture the data long enough, it will confess [to anything].
Ronald Coase
In the next block of three chapters, I focus on the core activity of data analysts: analysis, focusing on the goals of analysis within the organization and how to do impactful analysis.
I’ll examine activities such as analyzing data, designing metrics, gaining insights, and presenting or selling those insights, ideas, and recommendations to the decision-makers. Chapter 6 covers the design of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), and Chapter 7 focuses on data visualization and storytelling. This first chapter of the trio, however, focuses on analysis itself.
Importantly, it does not cover how to perform analysis or statistical inference because there are many better texts available that do that (see Further Reading). Instead, it considers the goal of the analyst: what does it mean for an analyst to analyze? What are they trying to achieve? What tools do they have in their toolkit? I’ll bring back the idea of levels of analytics from Chapter 1 and introduce some other perspectives on types of analysis.
The goal here is to highlight the range of statistical and visualization tools that are available to analysts to glean insights from data. A secondary goal is to urge analysts to use the appropriate tools and, where necessary, to learn more sophisticated tools that can provide a deeper level of understanding of the problem at hand.
A fine woodworker making a wooden ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.