How Can Local Councils Get Data Insights To Frontline Workers? | Peak Indicators
The most important step of the data journey for local councils is getting insights to decision makers on the frontline so they can start having a real impact on services.
Paul Clough of Peak Indicators discusses the best ways to communicate data insights to decision makers: from using graphs and visualisations that help explain what the data is saying to creating a compelling narrative that drives action.
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Paul Clough, Head of Data Science and AI
You could have a hundred fantastic graphs that show you all sorts of things, but you can’t show all of them in five minutes to a senior exec team. You’ve got to pick out: What are the key things that you need to communicate? What are the messages that you want to get across? And how are you gonna do that? It’s a very challenging thing, I think, for some analytics teams to hand over the kind of results, the outcomes of what they do, to the decision makers. Whoever that might be.
So the sorts of things I think would help here could be, when you’re thinking about dashboards for example, it may be around the designs that you have, the way that you present information — thinking about accessibility issues, thinking about user experience and how that can help in terms of improving the way that the data comes across.
The whole idea of a narrative and story is super important. The visualisation and report on its own isn’t enough, you have to embed it within the story. By doing that, what you’re trying to think about is: What are the key take home messages? What’s important?
Nathan Makalean
How important is it to set realistic expectations before these projects? And how can that lead to challenges later down the line if you don’t?
Paul Clough
There’s often the expectation that AI is somehow magical, that predictive models will be perfect, and they never will be — because often they’re dealing with incomplete data.
Start with those kinds of quick wins, where you start to buy-in the trust, you start to develop your ways of working, and you start to gradually change things over time. If you do simple projects, and they’re effective, and they’re successful, then it’s more likely that people will listen.
Nathan Makalena
And how important is it getting organisational buy-in right from the off?
Paul Clough
So you sort of need to not just drop analytical data-driven projects on people. You know, what you want to be doing is getting buy-in across the organisation — at all levels as well, not just the senior exec and the people who hold the money, but the frontline staff as well.
And ideally, by getting that kind of buy-in, seeing it as a journey, seeing it as an evolution — a more gradual thing rather than just kind of immediate overnight change — I think is part of those ingredients to success.
So what you’ve got to be doing is just properly empowering those frontline staff, or empowering those business users, with the new tools, techniques, technologies, for them to be able to do their jobs (and do their jobs hopefully more efficiently). Listen to people’s voices and get them involved. You know, most AI projects and data science projects will fail unless you get the kind of buy in from the end user
Originally published at https://www.peakindicators.com on January 6, 2022.
