Bridge Analytics Communication Gap

Bridge Analytics Communication Gap

Effective communication is quite crucial for business analysts, because they need to translate data to business insights and then communicate the ideas with their colleagues and clients. But inefficient communication happens in the analytics field. Bridging analytics communication gap is to solve such problems as how to put big data into business story and how to communicate to person who are not familiar with data.        

Harry Chamber’s book Effective Communication Skills is helpful for analysts to build the bridge of effective communication. He gives two mainly points focusing on what is two critical components of effective communication and how to build an effective communication bridge.      

To give effective communication, one should know important communication components first: content and emotional impact. Message content is the information sent by senders and emotional impact is the reflection given by receivers. In analytics, situations are more complex, because data itself is hard to read and be understood. Analysts could focus on both content and reflection to make big data easy understand.

First, we should identify our audience and choose proper information and content. For example, Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst, gave TED speeches about big data. Because her audience are the ordinary people who are interested in data, she used the graph to illustrate that we are living in the world with increasing data, and told her son’s story to give the main point that as we receive more and more data, we need to deepen our critical thinking skills. The moving story from every-day life do have amazing power. Audience applauded and nodded to show their understanding. We need to know our audience and their needs, and carefully prepare for the beginnings, changes, examples and conclusion of our speech.

Then we should pay attention to the reflection and reaction of our audience. A common but unrealistic assumption is that all the audience understood the whole content as senders expect. Communication should be a dynamic process between senders and receivers, and one dimensional communication is ineffective, inaccurate and boringTo communicate effectively, we need to keep eye contact to know whether audience understand or not, and sometimes asking questions can also get direct reflection. Try to use simple, clear word and vivid graph also help analysts communicate effectively.

Getting feedback from our audience is also effective way to help us improve the communication skills. In the communication class, we gave two-minute speech and receive feedback from our peers and teacher. We can know our strengths and weakness and how to improve it. And giving feedback to others would push us to think about how to make effective communication.

All in all, practice makes perfect. Organizing the content with clear words and selective information, focusing on audience reflection, and giving and receiving feedback from others are three effective ways to bridge analytics communication gap.