Modern System Administration

Chapter 10. Presentations

Stories are the fundamental way that humans organize and make sense of information. Stories provide structure and purpose to data. Effective system administrators recognize the power of a good narrative and use different mediums to share messages effectively. They organize their information and communicate beyond text to tell a story with images, photos, graphs, charts, audio, and even video. So often, when mentoring other sysadmins trying to make a change in their organization, I share some key concepts about data organization and presentation.

Show 5 clever people the same data, and they’ll develop 10 interpretations. You can’t assume that others will draw the same conclusions unless you put in the effort to craft a narrative that will lead and influence people. In this chapter, I want to help you learn how to distill information and present it compellingly to tell the necessary stories to influence people regardless of authority.

Know Your Audience

Just like when writing documentation, you need to assess your audience to make custom and specific visualizations when preparing and presenting the information.

In the movies, the protagonist can often determine the next right step based on a single query or dashboard that integrates all the necessary data. They glance at this digital display of information and have the right context to make a fast decision.

And in the real world, while your management may request a “single pane of glass” to distill and ...