6.2 Introducing data, questions and users
“… visual communication is a must-have skill for all managers, because more and more often, it’s the only way to make sense of the work they do.” – Berinato (2016)
“One drawback, though, is that [the availabiity of tools] reinforces the impulse to ‘click and viz’ without first thinking about your purpose and goals.”
– Berinato (2016)
Unless we wish data-analytics to be a scattershot type approach then we badly need the focus that answering questions offers. In communicating we need to think about the recipient.
So what type of question(s) might we be dealing with? And where might they come from? We explore this in Section on if data should answer questions then who is asking?.
It’s important to stress that often the data-analyst may need to do significant work to uncover the key and important questions. This most likely to succeed in conjunction with the client or problem owner, not least because they are very likely to be domain problem experts.
One means for promoting this level of engagement are interactive analyses. Here R offers excellent support in the form of the Shiny framework (Wickham 2021).