Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

AN EFFECTIVE ANALYTICS COMMUNICATION STRATEGY

From the analytics perspective, effective communication refers to the ability to convey information to the target audience. It is the activity of sharing analysis findings. It is about telling others what happened. What is happening? What will happen? And how does one’s finding help the stakeholders address their business challenges? In effect, it is the ability to disseminate information effectively to others in a way that makes sense to your audience. Effective analytics communication strategy is about using simple words, sentences, tables, graphs, and other visual cues to represent the knowledge imparted from the data. Communicating findings from analytics involves “connecting the dots” between the overall business challenge down to what we observe and create from the data into insights that are relevant to the different stakeholders.

Effective communication also entails packaging a core message that reflects analytics’ overall objective strategy, findings, purpose, and mission to convince key stakeholders and prepare them to embrace analytics and execute on the findings. It helps to frame the scope of analytics and set expectations for each stakeholder. To this end, one important tool to develop is an analytics communication plan that can synchronize organizational units and align resources to deliver a common core message from analytics. To be effective, an analytics communication plan is based on the SELLING concept as defined ...