From the ‘what’ to the ‘why’: data storytelling with Peter Jackson

Data teams in many organizations around the world are churning out huge numbers of dashboards and reports without getting any return on their efforts. If nothing is changing on the back of all of these insights being fed back into the business, something is going wrong. There’s a significant gap between telling decision makers within the business that something is happening and then persuading them to do something about it. This gap can be filled by data storytelling, as we find out in our latest podcast.

To get the inside track on the topic, we spoke with Peter Jackson, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Exasol. Throughout his career, Peter’s been at the sharp end of using data storytelling to get that all-important buy-in from the C-suite. He walks us through some great examples of data storytelling being done well, explores the need for business literacy within data teams and covers the new skills you should be looking for in your team.

For all this and more, listen to the data storytelling podcast here:

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How are we defining data storytelling?

According to TDWI, it’s defined as:

The practice of building a narrative around a set of data and its accompanying visualizations to help convey the meaning of that data in a powerful and compelling fashion.

What role should the CDO play?

If you want to read more from Peter about topics like data storytelling and the role of the CDO within an organization, check out his contributions throughout The Data Dreamer. And for those looking to dig even deeper, Peter co-authored The Chief Data Officer’s Playbook with Caroline Carruthers, which offers new insights into the role of the CDO and the data environment.