Analytics | Collaborative Creativity
My first thought when thinking of analytics originally was not creativity and collaboration but more so scientific, procedural, and mathematical thought. However, creativity has many forms and creative collaboration is a pivotal differentiator in generating incremental business opportunities.
From my perspective as a digital analyst, skills can be labeled into three categories:
1. Developing - Collecting data and organizing it in an automated scalable manner for reporting and visualizations.
2. Exploration- Leveraging critical thinking, hypothesizing, and data exploration using the tools that have been developed to identify trends.
3. Advising - Determining which information from the exploration is actionable and communicating the evidence and impact effectively.
These categories drive the engine of descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive analytics.
Developing is incredibly important and requires technical skills to reach the objective. More efficient automation and better development opens up time for exploration and better advising. Creativity from my experience often leads to more efficient development such as discovering a new way to merge two technologies and reduce human input. Collaboration and institutional knowledge facilitate automation and improve the procedures across a larger span of an organization.
I feel that the objective in analytics is maximizing the time spent on Exploration. Exploration involves understanding all of the variables that are at play and observing. The challenge is being creative and hypothesizing as to what may not be recognized at the moment that will impact the business. A culture of high volume ideas that engages creatively fuels a strong analytics engine.
Advising is understanding the world of data as well as business. The more institutional knowledge that is held about the company and industry, the more effective the delivery. Understanding the audience's objective, level of knowledge is a challenging collaborative endeavor and a differentiating factor.
Conscious effort and practice can improve collaboration in creativity in analytics. For individuals and organizations striving for high performance it is critical to focus on collaborating to generate ideas.