Making Data Sexy

Thom Naylor, Managing Director of Excellent Solutions, discusses making data sexy

So how exactly did I get here? I vaguely remember the meeting. “You should do a blog”, they said. “Good idea”, I thought, “Blogs are all the rage nowadays and they connect you to like minded people locally, nationally and internationally”. “You should try and make Data sexy”, they said. “Who doesn’t like sexy”, I thought. “Sexy sells, sexy engages people, sexy gets people drooling about your topic of choice”.

Five minutes later I was stood on the pavement and the rational side of my brain belatedly (far too belatedly) came to the party! “You do realize you have just said that you are going to write a blog that makes data sexy”, it said. “Oh no”, I wailed with my head in my hands.

I know that you are thinking, there is no way this guy can make data sexy – not in a million years and, truth be told, I have to agree with you. That said, there is a saying that roughly goes like this, “If you shoot for the stars and end up missing, you may still end up landing on the moon and that ain’t half bad.” – so here goes.

Data is all around us and often goes completely unnoticed and unused, especially in the businesses we own, manage and work for. After all, who has time to look at row upon row of numbers and letters – you pretty much have to speak binary. Yet, hidden in the data is the life story of your business. The very things that bring excitement, trepidation, joy and sorrow to your working day (the new biggest ever deal you just closed, the day where no customers came through the door, the tough but successful renegotiation of supplier prices) are all there lurking within your data.

Now what if I told you that with a small amount of effort you could draw out the story of your business from that data and tell that story in a compelling way to a variety of audiences. You may already do something of this nature with graphical illustrations showing historic performance in which case, congratulations, you have already taken the first step. But telling the story of what has happened in the past is just the beginning.

What if you could take that same data and use it to start writing and influencing the future story of your business? What if data, interrogated thoroughly and interpreted wisely, could make your business highs, even higher and your business lows, a little less low. Surely then you would have awoken the powerful, yet sleeping, potential of data within your business.

Perhaps this brief story has not reached the giddying heights of the stars (that was always a tough ask) but I hope that it has, at least, piqued your interest enough that you may wish to hear a little more. So please feel free to return soon and see how data could just help you start to write the future of your business rather than just read about it’s past.

For more information please visit the Excellent Solutions website. 

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