Leveraging the DIKW Pyramid
According to Russell Ackoff, a systems theorist and professor of organisational change, the content of the human mind can be classified into five categories:
Data: symbols
Information: data that is processed to be useful; provides answers to ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ questions
Knowledge: application of data and information; answers ‘how’ questions
Insights: The appreciation of ‘why’
Wisdom: Evaluated insights.
Our job is to take our audience through this journey, moving them and ourselves from low-value Data to high-value Wisdom. We can’t assume that without our help, our audience can get information, insight, and wisdom from data. We also want to ensure we don’t just cherry-pick the data points that prove what they already think is true.
Source: meme adapted from https://www.gapingvoid.com/
Rather than asking whether we need a dashboard or report, the question is, what combination of reporting and dashboards will our business and all our stakeholders need? You need a mix of options for different situations and audiences. Who wants the data and why?
We can then break our considerations into types of ‘data presentations’:
● Full Access to the data – Data à Information.
This could be Google Analytics or any other data set or platform that collects and displays large amounts of unfiltered and unvalidated data. This is usually what marketing managers and business owners are left with, often causing more trouble and stress than it’s worth.
● Self-Service Dashboards (Tactical or Strategic) – Data à Information à Knowledge.
Self-service dashboards for those trained to use them. Open to interpretation, flexible but controlled, with optional dropdowns and filters. Tactical or strategic depending on the audience. Teams should be warned about how often a dashboard’s data is checked and reviewed and take any analysis with a pinch of salt. The ability to derive useful information and knowledge will be down to the skill and experience of the user.
● Delivered Dashboards/Reports – Knowledge à Insights à Wisdom.
Delivered at a set time with detailed commentary to a set audience. The data presented in tables or charts will be segmented. Elements presented will be trended over time, and ideally, also indexed against a previously-agreed-upon target for the key performance indicator (KPI). The ultimate goal is to provide timely, useful wisdom for high-value decision-making.
● Commissioned Reports – Knowledge à Insights à Wisdom.
One-off reports that are ad-hoc in nature and might otherwise complicate the existing reporting. These, along with Delivered Dashboards/Reports, should have the highest accuracy.
Those with the right expertise, closest to the data, that understand how it’s collected and processed should be trusted with the most access and responsibility for guiding others in the process of extracting actionable business impacts. A big thank you to Avinash for allowing the adaption of this chart – his blog is a must (see source).
Source: MckTui Consulting, adapted from https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-tactical-best-practices-tips-examples/
By building all these key variables into a spreadsheet, we can and should build our reporting and dashboard strategic plan before starting. This could form part of our project plan or even live as a separate tab in our measurement plan.
Source: MckTui Consulting.
This lets us clearly define who wants data, why, what, and when – as well as setting and documenting expectations up-front.
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