Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

Foreword

It’s been more than a decade since I took my first statistics course in college. Unlike for many, my introduction to statistics brings back happy memories of an enthusiastic professor who jaunted up and down the stairs of the lecture hall. It’s not easy to get excited about beginning concepts in distributions and hypothesis testing, but he pulled it off. I grew interested in working with and understanding data which eventually led to many years of graduate school. I had no clue back in college that statistics—or more generally, using data—would be so popular now. I just liked to play with data. And there’s a lot of data to play with these days.

Every day I read or hear about companies and organizations that use data in some way. There’s a wide array of applications: improving business, providing better service to customers, helping to make the lives of others easier, or communicating complex processes. There’s an excitement. People want to gain insights from all this data they collected.

There’s a gotcha though, and it’s a big one. You can’t just take a stream of data, plug it into the most expensive software you can find, and gather instant results—regardless of whether you’re one person or a big organization. It’s never that easy. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is trying to sell you something.

As someone focused on data visualization, I would love to build a dashboard or develop an interactive tool that enables people ...