And I bombed.

The material was dry as it was, but it wasn’t, by any means, unmanageable content. I just didn’t do a good job of managing it!

Fast forward 10 years, and I found myself giving a presentation to a room of 50-60 people, and the material was set up to be just as naturally engaging — presenting on an approach to measurement and analytics to…a bunch of marketers.

The presentation went much better, judging both from the engagement level of the audience and discussions that it has prompted weeks later. I’m no Steve Jobs, but I’ve paid attention to what seems to work and what doesn’t (both in my presentations and others), read some articles here and there, and, I realized, read a few books along the way that have really helped.

So, with that — four books that all have a heavy component of “how the brain works” and that, collectively, have taught me a lot about how to present information, be it a dashboard, a report, or a presentation.

Gladwell and Gilbert

The first two books are books that I read within a few months of each other. To this day, I recall specific anecdotes with no idea which book they came from. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking made the rounds when it first came out as “another great book by Malcolm Gladwell” (following The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference). The fundamental anecdote of Blink has to do with our “adaptive unconscious” — our intuition and ability to “know” things without fully needing to process them. As he dives into example after example, Gladwell touched on various aspects of how the brain works.

Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness takes a more directly psychological angle, but it covers some of the same territory. One of Gilbert’s main points is that the human brain does not remember things like we think it does — pointing out that a vividly remembered, down-to-the-color-of-the-shirt-you-were-wearing memory is not really an as-recorded memory at all. Rather, the brain remembers a few specific details and then makes up / fills in the rest when the memory gets called up. It’s so good at filling in these blanks that it fools itself into not being able to tell fact from interpolation!

Both of these books made an impact on me, because they pointed out that how we take in, process, and store information doesn’t work at all like we intuitively think it does. And, both books set up the next two books by shaking the assumptional foundations I had of how we, as humans, think.

Straight-Up Business Reading

Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a practical manual for communicating information that you want your audience to pay attention to and retain. They boil the components into a five-letter acronym — S.U.C.C.E.S. — and go into each component in detail.

The elements are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories, and they provide a nice framework for critiquing how we communicate any idea. Irecognize that I regularly struggle with Simple, Concrete, and Stories as elements in my blog posts. But, every element is one that can be injected using some discipline and time to do so. I nailed all three of these elements a number of years ago when I found myself on an internal lecture circuit trying to drum up large donors for my company’s annual United Way campaign — I was heavily vested in conveying a strong message, and I wound up using an example of my grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s as a way to pull the audience in and ask them to find something they were passionate about and support it. I also wove in various quirky takes on how $10/week would really add up — think the sort of thing you hear again and again from your local NPR station during fundraising drives. In the case of that campaign, we blew our numbers out of the water — had a 500% increase in the number of people who gave at the “leadership level” that year. Now, a lot of things had to come together to make that happen, but, to this day, I’m sure my well-crafted, well-rehearsed, and sincere speech made to at least a dozen different groups of employees (and the fact that I was a fairly low-level employee making the case — I was asking people who were making a lot more money than I was to give at least as much as I was), played a non-trivial role.

And that was years before I read Made to Stick. But, the book helped me reflect on any number of presentations — ones that worked and ones that didn’t.

And, Finally, Wisdom from a Neuroscientist

The last book in this tetralogy is one that I just finished reading — Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, by John Medina. I stumbled across the book as a recommendation from Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, so I wasn’t surprised that it had some very practical tips, as well as the “why?” behind them, for communicating effectively. Medina’s premise is that there’s a ton of stuff we don’t yet understand about the brain. BUT, there are also a lot of things we do know about the brain, and many of those lay out pretty clearly that the way we work in business and the way our education system is set up both run counter to how the brain naturally functions.

These “things we do know” are broken down into 12 “rules” — exercise (good for the brain), survival (why and how the brain evolved…and implications), wiring (how the brain works at a highly micro level), attention (there’s NO SUCH THING as multitasking…and other goodies), short-term memory (what makes it there and how), long-term memory (what makes it there, how, and how long it takes to get there), sleep (good for the brain), stress (some kinds are good, some kinds are bad), sensory integration (the more senses involved, the better the memory), vision (the #1 sense), gender (men are from Mars…), exploration (age doesn’t really degrade our ability to learn). Medina ends each chapter (one rule per chapter) with “Ideas” — implications for the real world based on the information presented.

The book goes into very technical detail about how, when, and where electrical charges zip around in our skulls to accomplish different tasks. While that information is not directly applicable, each time he goes there it’s as a setup to more directly useful information. Throughout the book, Medina provides practical thoughts for how to communicate more effectively — helping people pay attention (getting the information you are communicating into working memory) and retain the information over both the short and the long term. Two of my absolute favorite nuggets from the book were:

• p. 130 (in the chapter on long-term memory) — Medina has the reader do a little memory exercise with the following characters: “3 $ 8 ? A % 9.” The fact he drops after the exercise is interesting: “The human brain can hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds! If something does not happen in that short stretch of time, the information becomes lost.” This is about getting information on its way from working memory to long-term memory and how repetition, thinking about the information, and talking about the information all helps it on its way. As a communicator (be it through a presentation or through a dashboard of data), this seems like powerful stuff — how often have we all seen someone cut loose with slide after slide of mind-numbing information? The human brain simply cannot take all of that in and retain it without some help!
• p. 239 (in the chapter on vision) — Medina has a section titled “Toss your PowerPoint presentations.” I groaned. While I get highly annoyed by the rampant misuse of PowerPoint, I’m not a Tufte acolyte to the point that I see the tool itself as evil. In the second paragraph, though, Medina clarifies by providing a two-step prescription: 1) burn your current presentations, and 2) make new ones. Medina’s beef with PowerPoint is that the default slide template is text-based with a six-level hierarchy. This entire chapter is about how a picture really is worth 1,000 words, and Medina pleads with the reader to cut wayyy back on the text in his/her presentations (he has a fascinating explanation of how, when we read, we’re really interpreting each letter as a small picture…and that’s actually not a good thing for retention of information).

There are oodles of other good information in the book, but these are two of the snippets that really resonated with me.

Better to Be Steve Jobs than Bill Gates

I do believe that some people have better communication instincts than others. I’ll never be Steve Jobs when it comes to holding an auditorium in the palm of my hand. But, between reading these books and thinking through my own evolution as a communicator (this blog notwithstanding…but I’ve always said that I write this blog to keep my e-mails shorter and to try out ideas that occur to me during the day — sorry folks…both of you…but this blog is mostly for me!), I’m convinced that effective communication is a trainable skill.

I’ve also noticed that, the more I have to communicate, and the more I work to do so effectively, the easier it seems to be getting. In another 20 years, I might just have it nailed!Similar Posts:

• Stephen Few’s Derivation of Tufte: The Data-Pixel Ratio
• One more reason why you CAN’T just start with the data
• The “Right” Talent: an MVT-Meets-Fractional-Factorial-Design Anecdote
• Depth vs. Breadth, Data Presentation vs. Absorption, Frank and Bernanke
• Data Visualization — Few’s Examples

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brain, Chip Heath, communication, Dan Heath, Daniel Gilbert, John Medina, Malcolm Gladwell, memory

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

• I changed jobs — left Nationwide to become Director, Measurement and Analytics at Resource Interactive — which is 1000% the “right” move, but meant for a hectic/stressful month
• Back-to-school time, which was more than just getting our kids ready — my wife ran our two sons’ elementary school’s entire supply sale…and my “I’ll show you a few tricks in Excel to help you stay organized” offer morphed into a full-blown custom ERP system built in MS Access; August was the month when all the supplies arrived (think almost 10,000 no. 2 pencils…) and had to be divvied up; I did no divvying, but there were a number of late-breaking report requests; at last count, the database had over 20 tables (it’s almost a fully denormalized database), over 40 queries, 12 forms, and 20+ reports; AND…it’s now been extended to also handle the production of the school’s student directory; gotta love MS Access!
• Company, company, company — two visits from friends in Texas, two visits from my parents, a visit from my in-laws, and my mother-in-law moved in for six weeks to convalesce from surgery…all in a 3-week period in August

I’ve got one more good customer data management post in me that needs to get written, at which point I expect to be shifting over to more web analytics-y, social media measurement-y posts going forward.

And…as I played around with Drupal for a couple of projects over the past couple of months, I realized that the theme that I settled on after weeks of experimentation on this blog…is one that was built for WordPress to mimic one of the Drupal default themes! How embarrassing!

Please be patient! My life will settle back down soon (I hope). In the meantime, if you’re going to be in Columbus in the middle of September, consider stopping by this month’s Web Analytics Wednesday on September 16th!Similar Posts:

• Getting Started with Master Data Management (MDM)
• Web Analytics Tracking on a Facebook Page
• A Little Bit of Data Can Be a Time-Consuming Thing
• Google Analytics = Strawberry?
• Dashboard Design Part 1 of 3: An Iterative Tale

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Drupal, MS Access, Nationwide, Resource Interactive

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Minimum require (per project): 15-20 hours a week

Software Skills (in order of importance):

• SPSS (v15 to V17) – Intermediate to Expert (4+ years)
  Ability to:
  • Navigate using command code (little reliance on GUI)
  • Develop concise syntax
  • Clearly document processes
  • Working knowledge of data import and export procedures
  • Techniques to manipulate string and numeric data
  • Logic construction and deconstruction
  • Loop and do repeat functions
  • Descriptive statistics
  • Custom tables
  • Macros
• Text Editor – Intermediate (3+ years)
• Excel – Intermediate (3+ years)

General Experience (in order of importance):

• Data management:
  • Processing
  • Troubleshooting: data / logic issues
  • Basic analysis
  • Basic to complex reporting
• Work environment: small programming teams
• Online surveys
• Research / market research (consumer and/or B2B)
• Technology sector

General Skills

• Technical orientation
• Strong attention to detail
• Strong problem solver

Nice to Have Skills:

• Python
• Visual Basic

Ping me for details (the details being “here’s the company and a contact person”) at: tim at gilliganondata dot com.Similar Posts:

• “The Axiom of Research” and “The Axiom of Action”
• "Time Span" vs. "Time Range"…reporting
• Two Ways to Gauge if Someone Really Uses Excel
• Reporting vs. Analysis
• What’s Going on at WebTrends?

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: job, SPSS

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

BUT…I can’t help but add in my own drool thoughts on some of his ideas:

1. Green Computing — not much to add here; this is more about next generation mainframes that run on a less power than the processors of yesteryear
2. Social Networking — it stands to reason that Web 2.0 has a place in BI, and Campbell starts to explain the wherefore and the why. One gap I’ve never seen a BI tool fill effectively is the ability to embed ad hoc comments and explanations within a report. That’s one of the reasons that Excel sticks around — because an Excel based report has to be “produced” in some fashion, there is an opportunity to review, analyze, and provide an assessment within the report. Enterprise BI tools have a much harder time enabling this — when it’s come up with BI tool vendors, it tends to get treated more as a data problem than a tool problem. In other words, “Sure, if you’ve got data about the reports stored somewhere, you can use our tool to display it.” What Campbell starts to touch on in his post is the potential for incorporating social bookmarking (“this view of this data is interesting and here is why”) and commenting/collaboration to truly start blending BI with knowledge management. The challenge is going to be that reports are becoming increasingly dynamic, and users are getting greater control over what they see and how. With roles-based data access, the data that users see on the same report varies from user to user. That’s going to make it challenging to manage “social” collaboration. Challenging…but something that I hope the enterprise BI vendors are trying to overcome.
3. Data Visualization — I wouldn’t have a category on this blog dedicated to data visualization if I didn’t think this was important. I can’t help but wonder if Campbell is realizing that Cognos was as guilty as the other major BI players of confusing “demo-y neat” with “effective” when it comes to past BI tool feature development. From his post: “The best visualizations do not necessarily involve the most complex graphics or charts, but rather the best representation of the data.” Amen, brother!!! Effective data visualization is finally starting to get some traction — or, at least, a growing list of vocal advocates (side note: Jon Peltier has started up a Chart Busters category on his blog — worth checking out). What I would like to see: BI vendors taking more responsibility for helping their users present data effectively. Maybe a wizard in report builders that ask questions about the type of data being presented? Maybe a blinking red popup warning (preferably with loud sirens) whenever someone selects the 3D effect for a chart? The challenge with data visualization is that soooooo many analysts: 1) are not inherently wired for effective visualization, and 2) wildly underestimate how important it is.
4. Mobile — I attended a session on mobile BI almost five years ago at a TDWI conference…and I still don’t see this as being a particularly hot topic. Even Campbell, with his mention of RFIDs, seems to think this is as much about new data sources as it is about reporting and analysis in a handheld environment.
5. Predictive Analytics — this has been the Holy Grail of BI for years. I don’t have enough exposure to enough companies who have successfully operationalized predictive analytics to speak with too much authority here. But, I’d bet good money that every company that is successful in this area has long since mastered the fundamentals of performance measurement. In other words, predictive analytics is the future, but too many businesses are thinking they can run (predictive analytics) before they crawl (performance measurement / KPIs / effective scorecards).
6. Composite Applications — this seems like a fancy way to say “user-controlled portals.” This really ties into the social networking (or at least Web 2.0), I think, in that a user’s ability to build a custom home page with “widgets” from different data sources that focus on what he/she truly views as important. Taking this a step farther — measuring the usage of those widgets — which ones are turned on, as well as which ones are drilled into — seems like a good way to assess whether what the corporate party line says is important is what line management is really using. There are some intriguing possibilities there as an extension of the “reports on the usage of reports” that gets bandied about any time a company starts coming to terms with report explosion in their BI (or web analytics) environment.
7. Cloud Computing – I actually had to go and look up the definition of cloud computing a couple of weeks ago after asking a co-worker who used the term if cloud computing and SaaS were the same thing (answer: SaaS is a subset of cloud computing…but probably the most dominant form). This is a must-have for the future of BI — as our lives become increasingly computerized, the days of a locally installed BI client are numbered. I regularly float between three different computers and two Blackberries…and lose patience when what I need to do is tied to only one machine.
8. Multitouch — think of the zoom in / zoom out capabilities of an iPhone. This, like mobile computing, doesn’t seem so much “hot” to me as somewhat futuristic. The best example of multitouch data exploration that I can think of is John King’s widely-mocked electoral maps on CNN (never did I miss Tim Russert and his handheld whiteboard more than when watching King on election night!). I get the theoretical possibilities…but we’ve got a long ways to go before there is truly a practical application of multitouch.

As I started with, there are a lot of exciting possibilities to consider here. I hope all of these topics are considered “hot” by BI vendors and BI practicitioners — making headway on just a few of them would get us off the plateau we’ve been on for the past few years.Similar Posts:

• A GIANT in web analytics says, "Don’t get your hopes up…"
• Fun / Interesting Data on Internet/Web 2.0 Usage
• Social Media Measurement: A Practitioner’s Practical Guide
• Social Media ROI: Stop the Insanity!
• "Time Span" vs. "Time Range"…reporting

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CNN, Cognos, Don Campbell, IBM, trends

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

So, I updated that. But, in the process, I decided to re-open a nasty can of worms that I’d only casually eyed in the past, and I added a Favorite Feeds page to the site. There were two reasons this was a dicey place to go:

• While I’ve got the best intentions for putting up the page — to give people who come to my site an easy way to scan the content I’m most likely reviewing through my feed reader and possibly discover a new blog or two they’d like to follow — the “content ownership” makes for a touchy subject. There is plenty of splogging going on out there, and that’s really not my intent.
• The logistics of actually posting a page with a dynamically generated, yet easy to read and duly giving credit where credit is due, list was trickier than it seemed like it ought to be

I think I handled both of these challenges successfully, but please drop a comment if you think I’ve missed something.

Approach to Avoiding Inappropriate Republishing of Content

What I settled on was only posting the post titles and prepending each post with the source in brackets. Clicking on the link takes you to the content on the site where it originated (via feedproxy.google.com, which was entirely unintentional, but may yield some nice benefits down the road — I don’t think this introduces any ethical issues).

Technical Approach for Pulling this Off Using WordPress

I’m sure there are technically more elegant solutions, but here’s the list of how I stitched things together to make the page work:

1. Created a Yahoo! Pipe that pulls each of these feeds, prepends the source in brackets, and then combines all of the feeds into a single feed sorted from newest to oldest publication date
2. Ran the pipe through Feedburner — this wasn’t absolutely necessary, but just seemed like a best practice (I subscribe to the feed directly in my feed reader for when time is really short)
3. Installed both the Exec-PHP WordPress plugin and the WP-RSSImport plugin
4. To get Exec-PHP to work, and because I do use the WordPress WYSIWYG editor, I created a new user account that has the WYSIWYG editor turned off and used that account to create the new page
5. To get WP-RSSImport to work, I ran the documentation page through Google to get enough of a translation for me to figure out that I needed to use the following code on the new page I created:
   <?php RSSImport(20,”http://feeds2.feedburner.com/GilliganOnDataFavoriteFeeds”,false,false); ?>

It took a number of false starts, but the result seems fairly clean, so I’m going to go with it.

Whatcha’ think?Similar Posts:

• Facebook Measurement: Impressions from Status Updates
• My RSS Feed is Down. I wish you could see that.
• Welcome to the New Home of Gilligan on Data!
• Web Analytics Tracking on a Facebook Page
• Hubspot: 2010 Facebook Page Marketing Guide

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blogroll, Exec-PHP, Feedburner, WP-RSSImport, Yahoo! Pipes

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

• The Intermediate Stats class I’ve been taking (taught by an Ohio State professor on-site at my company, Nationwide…as in Nationwide: Car Insurance) is wrapping up, and the last day of the class includes a group presentation
• Jon Peltier really knocked one out of the park on the PTS Blog with his re-working of a weird, radial chart showing oil prices over time
• Jim Knight wrote Will Death by PowerPoint Soon be a Thing of the Past, where he summarized the highlights of a one day Presentation // Reboot workshop put on by Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte
• Knight’s post introduced me to Duarte (and her blog), who, according to Knight, is “most famous for developing the design of Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth presentation“
• In Duarte’s latest post — a video entry while she is on vacation in Hawaii — she reviews Advanced Presentations by Design: Creating Communication that Drives Action by Andrew Abela, which sounds like it is a bit dry, but makes a strong case for putting a lot more rigor behind developing a presentation

Put all of those together, and I’ve got a mental convergence of PowerPoint usage, presenting effectively (which goes well beyond “the deck”), and data visualization. These are all components of “effective communication” — the story, the content, how the content is displayed, how the content is talked to. In one of Reynolds’s sets of sample slides, you can clearly see the convergence of data visualization and PowerPoint. And, even he admits that this is a tricky thing to post…because it removes overall context for the content and it removes the presenter. Clearly, there are lots of resources out there that lay out fundamental best practices for effectively communicating in a presentation-style format. Three interrelated challenges, though:

• The importance of learning these fundamentals is wildly undervalued — it sounds like Abela’s book tries to quantify this value through tangible examples…but it’s a niche book that, I suspect, will not get widely read by the people who would most benefit from reading it
• “I need to put together a presentation for <tomorrow>/<Friday>/<next week>” – we’re living under enormous time pressure, and it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in “delivering a substantive deliverable” rather than “effectively communicating the information.” When I think about the number of presentations that I’ve developed and delivered over the past 15 years, the percentage that were truly effective, compelling, and engaging is abysmally small. And that’s a waste.
• Culture/expectations — every company has its own culture and norms. For many companies, the norms regarding presentations are that they are linear, slide-heavy, logically compiled, and mechanically delivered affairs. For recurring meetings, there is often the “template we use every month” whereby the structure is pre-defined, and each subsequent presentation is an update to the skeleton from the prior meeting. Walk into one of those meetings and deliver a truly rich, meaningful, presentation…and your liable to be shuttled off for a mandatory drug test, followed by a dressing down about “lack of proper preparation” because the slides were not sufficiently text/fact/content-heavy. <sigh>

What’s interesting to me is that I have spent a lot of time and energy boning up on my data visualization skills over the past few years. And, even if it takes me an extra 5-10 minutes in Excel, I never send out something that doesn’t have data viz best practices applied to some extent. As you would expect, applying those best practices is getting easier and faster with repetition and practice. So, can I do the same for presentations? And, again, that’s presentations-the-whole-enchilada, rather than presentations-the-PowerPoint-deck. Can I balance that with cultural norms — gently pushing the envelope rather than making a radical break? Can you? Should you?Similar Posts:

• “The Axiom of Research” and “The Axiom of Action”
• NCOA? CASS? AKA: My New Job
• Data Visualization — Few’s Examples
• Guy Kawasaki (Almost) Says 3-D Graphs Are Evil
• Rare x Rare x Rare in Customer Data Management

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Andrew Abela, Garr Reynolds, Jon Peltier, Nancy Duarte, Nationwide, PowerPoint, Presentation Zen, presentations, presenting, PTS Blog

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

During a discussion with a couple of my co-workers today, I made an observation about how my current company, as well as one of the major consulting firms we use, seem to really be in love with PowerPoint as the documentation/presentation/communication/general-purpose tool of choice. This prompted an immediate and emphatic response from one of those co-workers, who insisted that he “loved PowerPoint.” 

The exchange reminded me of the news last year that Katsuaki Watanabe, the President and CEO of Toyota, had decreed that employees stop using PowerPoint for the creation of documents. Garr Reynolds (aka, Presentation Zen…master), had a great take on the news. A couple of the highlights:

• To be clear, Watanabe did not “ban PowerPoint use,” as was mis-circulated at the time
• Watanabe did severely discourage the use of PowerPoint as a documentation tool — Reynolds calls these “slideuments” (slides + documents), which is a wickedly apt designation (and the core of this post)
• “…visuals projected on a screen in support of a live talk are very different from material that is to be printed and read and/or analyzed.”

And, a longer excerpt that is also key:

…there is often no distinction made between documents (slideuments made in PowerPoint) and presentation slides prepared for projection. They are often interchangeable. Sounds efficient, right? And it would be funny if it was not so inefficient, wasteful, and unproductive. The slideuments produced in Japan make understanding and precision harder when printed, and when used for projected slides in a darkened conference room, they are the country’s number one cure for insomnia. 

This was fundamentally the distinction that I was trying to get my co-worker to understand…without much luck. He’s clearly got some PowerPoint chops — he kept pulling up different slides he had done that had intricate builds and snazzy palettes and templates. But, the slides he was most proud of were heavily laden with annotations and text — they were standalone, comprehensive pictorial representations of complex concepts or systems.

Once he let loose with, “The point of PowerPoint is not the retention of the information — it’s the ‘wow’ factor,” I admitted defeat.

The title of this post is really the gist of my thesis here: Powerpoint the application is not the same thing as the application of PowerPoint. All too often, we don’t make that distinction. As Reynolds puts it, “Slideware is not a method, it’s simply a kind of tool.”

Think of a sledgehammer. It’s a tool — an application, if you will. But, it can applied for vastly different purposes:

• Used with a wedge to split firewood
• Used to drive a metal fencepost into the ground
• Used to prop open a door that keeps blowing shut

These are very different applications of the tool, and you would be clear as to what it was you were trying to accomplish when you hiked it over your shoulder and headed off to the task at hand.

[Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod -- see oodles more at gapingvoid.com]

The same holds true for PowerPoint. It has several different distinct possible uses…and it’s worth being clear as to which one you are tackling:

• A live, in-person demonstration — think simple, minimalist visual backup that supports an engaging presenter without distracting from what he/she is saying; think Steve Jobs (and, if you’re not familiar, check out one of the Presentation Zen posts on that subject)
• A live, online presentation via a webinar or web conferencing solution — this is a stickier wicket, in a lot of ways; it’s tempting to hedge against technology quirks by distributing the .ppt/.pptx file to all of the attendees via e-mail so they can simply pull up the deck and follow along, but this can be problematic, as the audience can then jump ahead and jump back. Generally, this sort of presentation is “the best alternative we have” when, ideally, you’d be doing a live, in-person demonstration. I would think this means the same minimalist approach described in the prior bullet would apply.
• Documentation never intended to be presented — slideuments — these really are problematic and should be avoided. 

All too often, there is a blurring of all three of these: a live presentation for some people, while other people are participating remotely, and the “presenter” has distributed the presentation as a handout that has all of the detail that he/she is going to present. That leaves the participants cognitively vascillating between listening to the presenter’s words and reading through the detail in the presentation that is either being projected or is printed in front of them. It’s just not effective. Make the presentation a presentation. If there is supplemental detail or review material, put that in a document and distribute it separately — before, during, or after the presentation. Let the presentation be truly visual and let it support the concepts and information being presented, with an emphasis on the concepts. 

Aside: To bridge back to the topic of this site, I’ve even seen PowerPoint used as a poor man’s BI presentation tool: PowerPoint 2007 linked to Excel 2007, which was in turn linked to Access 2007, which was in turn hooked into a SQL Server database. On the one hand…<shudder>. On the other hand, when it came to a portable (once the link to Excel was removed), shareable report, it wasn’t half bad! (Our intent was for it to also be a prototype that we could iterate on quickly as we developed requirements for a true BI tool…but that didn’t pan out for other reasons.)

So, that’s my mini-rant. It’s a problem. A clear problem. But, not one that I intend to solve. If you’re interested in thinking more about the topic check out:

• Presentation Zen (obviously)
• Laura Fitton / Pistachio Consulting — you can just look at her posts that have the presentation tag
• For the militant/extreme death-to-PowerPoint take, there’s the inimitable Edward Tufte…but he really does go a bit overboard 

Similar Posts:

• PowerPoint / Presentations / Data Visualization
• Another Successful Web Analytics Wednesday in Columbus
• Four Books That Will Change the Way You Communicate
• Guy Kawasaki (Almost) Says 3-D Graphs Are Evil
• SEO Tips and Thoughts at Web Analytics Wednesday

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Edward Tufte, Garr Reynolds, Laura Fitton, Pistachio Consulting, PowerPoint, Presentation Zen

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

I don’t have much more detail than that, but if this piques your interest, drop me a line at tim at gilliganondata dot com and I’ll put you in touch with someone who can provide more information.Similar Posts:

• More Data Is Better
• Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday Meets #fiestamovement
• Web Analytics Wednesday: Columbus Meets Cincinnati in June
• Multidimensional Lead Scoring — What’s All the Buzz About?
• When There’s Just Not Enough Good Data to Draw a Conclusion

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: job

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Why am I asking?

Because it doesn’t exist. Yet. Call it a working title for a project I’ve been kicking around in my head for a couple of years. In a lot of ways, this blog has been and continues to be a way for me to jot down and try out ideas to include in the book. This is my first stab at trying to capture a real structure, though.

The Best Little Book on Data

In my mind, the book will be a quick, easy read — as entertaining as a greased pig loose at a black-tie political fundraiser — but will really hammer home some key concepts around how to use data effectively. If I’m lucky, I’ll talk a cartoonist into some pen-and-ink, one-panel chucklers to sprinkle throughout it. I’ll come up with some sort of theme that will tie the chapter titles together — “myths” would be good…except that means every title is basically a negative of the subject; “Commandments” could work…but I’m too inherently politically correct to really be comfortable with biblical overtones; an “…In which our hero…” style (the “hero” being the reader, I guess?). Obviously, I need to work that out.

First cut at the structure:

• Introduction — who this book is for; in a nutshell, it’s targeted at anyone in business who knows they have a lot of data, who knows they need to be using that data…but who wants some practical tips and concepts as to how to actually go about doing just that.
• Chapter 1: Start with the Data…If You Want to Guarantee Failure – it’s tempting to think that, to use data effectively, the first thing you should do is go out and query/pull the data that you’re interested in. That’s a great way to get lost in spreadsheets and emerge hours (or days!) later with some charts that are, at best, interesting but not actionable, and, at worst, not even interesting.
• Chapter 2: Metrics vs. Analysis — providing some real clarity regarding the fundamentally different ways to “use data.” Metrics are for performance measurement and monitoring — they are all about the “what” and are tied to objectives and targets. Analysis is all about the “why” — it’s exploratory and needs to be hypothesis driven. Operational data is a third way, but not really covered in the book, so probably described here just to complete the framework.
• Chapter 3: Objective Clarity — a deeper dive into setting up metrics/performance measurement, and how to start with being clear as to the objectives for what’s being measured, going from there to identifying metrics (direct measures combined with proxy measures), establishing targets for the metrics (and why, “I can’t set one until I’ve tracked it for a while” is a total copout), and validating the framework
• Chapter 4: When “The Metric Went Up” Doesn’t Mean a Gosh Darn Thing – another chapter on metrics/performance measuremen. A discussion of the temptation to over-interpret time-based performance metrics. If a key metric is higher this month than last month…it doesn’t necessarily mean things are improving. This includes a high-level discussion of “signal vs. noise,” an illustration of how easy it is to get lulled into believing something is “good” or “bad” when it’s really “inconclusive,” and some techniques for avoiding this pitfall (such as using simple, rudimentary control limits to frame trend data).
• Chapter 5: Remember the Scientific Method? — a deeper dive on analysis and how it needs to be hypothesis-driven…but with the twist that you should validate that the results will be actionable just by assessing the hypothesis before actually pulling data and conducting the analysis
• Chapter 6: Data Visualization Matters – largely, a summary/highlights of the stellar work that Stephen Few has done (and, since he built on Tufte’s work, I’m sure there would be some level of homage to him as well). This will include a discussion of how graphic designers tend to not be wired to think about data and analysis, while highly data-oriented people tend to fall short when it comes to visual talent. Yet…to really deliver useful information, these have to come together. And, of course, illustrative before/after examples.
• Chapter 7: Microsoft Excel…and Why BI Vendors Hate It – the BI industry has tried to equate MS Excel with “spreadmarts” and, by extension, deride any company that is relying heavily on Excel for reporting and/or analysis as being wildly early on the maturity curve when it comes to using data. This chapter will blow some holes in that…while also providing guidance on when/where/how BI tools are needed (I don’t know where data warehousing will fit in — this chapter, a new chapter, or not at all). This chapter would also reference some freely downloadable spreadsheets with examples, macros, and instructions for customizing an Excel implementation to do some of the data visualization work that Excel can do…but doesn’t default to. Hmmm… JT? Miriam? I’m seeing myself snooping for some help from the experts on these!
• Chapter 8: Your Data is Dirty. Get Over It. – CRM data, ERP data, web analytics data, it doesn’t matter what kind of data. It’s always dirtier than the people who haven’t really drilled down into it assume. It’s really easy to get hung up on this when you start digging into it…and that’s a good way to waste a lot of effort. Which isn’t to say that some understanding of data gaps and shortcomings isn’t important.
• Chapter 9: Web Analytics – I’m not sure exactly where this fits, but it feels like it would be a mistake to not provide at least a basic overview of web analytics, pitfalls (which really go to not applying the core concepts already covered, but web analytics tools make it easy to forget them), and maybe even providing some thoughts on social media measurement.
• Chapter 10: A Collection of Data Cliches and Myths — This may actually be more of an appendix, but it’s worth sharing the cliches that are wrong and myths that are worth filing away, I think: “the myth of the step function” (unrealistic expectations), “the myth that people are cows” (might put this in the web analytics section), “if you can’t measure it, don’t do it” (and why that’s just plain silliness)
• Chapter 11: Bringing It All Together — I assume there will be such a chapter, but I’m going to have to rely on nailing the theme and the overall structure before I know how it will shake out.

What do you think? What’s missing? Which of these remind you of anecdotes in your own experience (haven’t you always dreamed of being included in the Acknowledgments section of a book? Even if it’s a free eBook?)? What topic(s) are you most interested in? Back to the questions I opened this post with — would you be interested in reading this book, and do you have friends or co-workers who would be interested? Or, am I just imagining that this would fill a gap that many businesses are struggling with?Similar Posts:

• The “Right” Talent: an MVT-Meets-Fractional-Factorial-Design Anecdote
• A Seismic Shift in Demand Generation: Putting Your Leads at the Center of Your Lead Marketing (Part 1 of 2)
• Data Visualization that Is Colorblind-Friendly — Excel 2007?
• Business cliches
• Social Media ROI: Stop the Insanity!

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book, cliches, Edmund Tufte, myths, Stephen Few

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So, on to the seven facts:

1. I cut out of college partway through my last semester to hike 2,142.7 miles from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail. I proposed to my girlfriend (now wife) when she came out to pick me up at the end of the trail.
2. I hate talking on the phone and generally won’t answer it at home.
3. My undergraduate degree is in architecture, although it is officially a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design. Since it is abbreviated BSAD, and due to the financial prospects for those of us who earned it, we pronounced it “Be Sad.” I don’t actually have much artistic talent, and I got out of architecture once I realized how woefully lacking I was on that front. I have an enormous appreciation for people who have visual design skills. 
4. A play I wrote in college got produced on campus and was later included as an example for the Playwrights in Performance class included in MIT’s Open Courseware project.
5. I grew up in Sour Lake, Texas, which is where Texaco was founded (originally named Texas Company). The town’s population was at 1,807 and dropping as of the last census before I moved away, but it has been a boomtown twice: first, in the mid-1800s, as a health resort when people (including Sam Houston) came from far and wide to soak in the town’ssulphur springs (long since dried up) that gave it its name, and again in the early 1900s when oil was discovered.
6. I am a rabid amateur baseball fan — especially focused on the Texas Longhorns and any team or league in which I have a kid participating; if I know I’m going to be able to watch an entire game, I’ll score it if I’ve got a score sheet and a pencil.
7. My cousin, Chris, authored the first Windows version of NCSA Mosaic (the first real web browser) and later developed the first CSS implementation in Internet Explorer. He’s currently the Platform Architect of the IE Platform team at Microsoft.

And, the seven people I’ll tag to pass this along:

• Chris Tammen because, like my cousin, he doesn’t post nearly often enough. And, he’s one of the most spontaneously hilarious people I know (for years, his resume included “Able to change many lightbulbs without the aid of a chair or stool” in the “Additional Skills” section, as he is a very tall fellow)
• Kristin Farwell because I already know that her mother and stepfather are professional skydivers (and she’s got a half-dozen ready tales of record-breaking and noteworthy jumps her stepfather has led or participated in), because she grew up as the daughter of a quintessential free spirit, because she taught me a lot of things about the internet, and because I have two framed photos she took in Austin hanging on the wall of my office…and I suspect her list would turn up more fascinating nuggets
• Greg Phelps because he’s an English major who has spent the last decade of his career doing hardcore database work. And he knows baseball.
• Avinash Kaushik because all I know is that he is one of the most brilliant and pragmatic minds in web analytics, that he is extremely personable, that he’s got a degree from The Ohio State University, and that Google probably knows how lucky they are to have him helping drive the evolution of Google Analytics.
• Amy Bills because she is really good at what she does, but, more importantly, because her perspective on the world tends to be hilariously wry and sardonic
• Bryan Cristina because he keeps saying he’s going to blog more, and maybe this will give him a nudge to get re-started. And because the filter between what he thinks and what he says is pretty minimal, which makes for entertaining tweets, Yahoo! group responses, and conversations
• Kevin Sasser because I met him when he was trying to sell me a content management system (and almost succeeded — would have if the product had been a better fit for our needs), and who I have since gotten to know as the author of one of the most entertaining, yet practical, blogs on how to be effective in Sales.

One person I would have tagged, but she was already tagged last year:

• Connie Bensen — community strategist, mentor, friend, and former .357 pistol packer; when the meme hit her, it was an “8 things” meme, but substantially the same (and more reasonable than the “25 things” that’s making its way around Facebook!)

Similar Posts:

• The “Right” Talent: an MVT-Meets-Fractional-Factorial-Design Anecdote
• 40 Million Reasons Your Customer Data Isn’t As Current as You Think (or Hope)
• Being Tim Wilson: Data Management, 2,142.7, and My Gilligan Moniker
• Columbus WAW — ExactTarget, CRM, Web Analytics, Google…Coupons/Chrome/Ad Manager, and More!
• Social Media Metrics — It’s not Just about Traffic

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh