Write this up. Start with a paragraph or two that describes your company at a high level. Then cover Steps 1 through 5, digging deep into what the company is all about. You're setting the context for the visualization. Now, do it!
Overview There are a few things you need to know before you can create an effective data visualization. Of course, you need the data and you need the analysis. That's the core of the visualization. Now the really hard work begins. Your boss asked you to present the result of the analysis to the executive suite. The CEO, CFO, CIO, COO, and all sorts of other CxOs are going to be there. You're a manager yourself with a pretty good handle on what your division is doing and how it fits into the larger organization. But this is something much larger than you've experienced before. What Happened? You need to understand your business's context before you can produce a meaningful visualization. There are several levels to the context, and you'll see this list many more times before the class is done: 1. Understand your business environment 2. Understand your business 3. Understand your business goals 4. Understand your business strategy 5. Recognize and understand your business problems 6. Analytics Goal Develop questions Ideally, you'd have Steps 1 through 5 done before you come up with meaningful questions to pass to your analytics team. In this case, let's assume that the question came from somewhere up the ladder and the result fell into your lap. Now you need to do some foundation work, so you'll know how to develop and how to frame your visualization. Who Are We? This is easiest with a company that you're working for, but it can be done with any company. The assignment is to pick a company, do some digging, and do Steps 1 through 5 . Go as deep as you can. For example, let's look at the business environment. In this case, business environment is all the external factors that affect how the company functions. This includes suppliers, customers, competition, business regulations, logistics, and everything else "out there" that affects the business. It might be easiest to think of all the broad classes of things (suppliers, customers, etc.) and then try to fill in the specifics. Then, what is the business? Really, what is the business? Is Starbucks in the business of selling coffee or selling a lifestyle? The mission statement is a good place to start. However, over time businesses sometimes drift from their original mission to doing something else. What is the business now? Continue through the other steps: business goals, business strategy, and business problems. This last one may be difficult. But if you have a big company you'll certainly find press, blogs, comments, social media, and other things that point out problems that the company is dealing with. Or should be dealing with. All this is the foundation of a good data visualization. You need to know what you're talking about before you start talking. If you don't know your audience, if you don't know where the audience is coming from, if you don't know what the audience's goals and problems are, then you will develop a visualization that is at best boring and at worst very misleading. To Do Write this up. Start with a paragraph or two that describes your company at a high level. Then cover Steps 1 through 5 , digging deep into what the company is all about. You're setting the context for the visualization. Now, do it
