Is your data telling a story?

By Payal Parikh, Director of Client Engagement at Heinz Marketing
With technological advances we’ve seen over the last two decades on data visualization and integrating data from various sources, there are still gaps in how we process that data, how we present it, and how we tell the story behind it.
In my early career days I had been guilty of presenting all the data I could find into ‘pretty’ charts and  would scroll through my slides in a room full of executives. I assumed just presenting the data I had access to was good enough and the executives could take away the key highlights by themselves from each slide or ask questions if they needed to. I knew the data inside out, so when questioned “what happened during that spike?”, I knew exactly what caused it. But I never highlighted it on my chart, nor told the story behind that data.