Blog Post #1 - Business Value Infographic

Business Value Infograph

The infograph shown above was created as a way to highlight the business value of three products within the analytics organization. Those products are Cloud, Data Catalog, and Data Science Workbench. All three products struggle to show business value or a return on investment because they support other products and tend to only show value over time.

What story is being told? What problem is being solved?

The story being told is the business value of three analytics products - Cloud, Data Catalog, and Data Science Workbench. These three products were selected because they are really more support products rather than direct-to-user products which tend to have a more discrete return on investment. We wanted a “one pager” infographic that showed the various business values which we could share with stakeholders, business partners, and others. It also needed to be something we could email and share without needing to explain the information. Most of the stakeholders and business partners are very busy and inundated with information so a clean, clear, one-page(ish) infographic was determined to be the best way to communicate the business value.

What makes it effective and/or ineffective?

It is effective with clear, easy to understand, non-technical business value. Such as under Cloud > Goblin, it states that what used to take a person “30- 60 minutes now takes the Goblin application less than 5 minutes” – that is a clear improvement even if I am unfamiliar with Cloud and/or the Goblin application. There are also several statements under the Data Catalog and Data Science Workbench sections that clearly show business value. The three products also clearly have their own sections on the infographic. The Data Science Workbench section has four boxes each with a “before and after” statement which makes the business value very clear. I think the different colors and fonts used help highlight the information although others may find it too “busy”. Although there is a box that explains why these three products were selected, it may not be clear to someone outside of the analytics group or outside of IT. The people who would get the most out of the infographic are those already familiar with the products.

Are there any data fallacies or inaccuracies?

The infographic does not include the development time or start up costs for any of the three products. So even with the clear business value, the actual return on investment might not be so high. There is also no mention of the costs to maintain. For example, the savings of 30 minutes per person for Goblin may not be so impressive if it turns out that Goblin is a large complex application that takes a large team to maintain. Additionally, business value itself could be a fallacy. As these products do not have a direct correlation to business value or return on investment, did we “invent” business value and measurable metrics for the products?

Are there other questions the visualization causes?

The questions that may come up include maintenance costs and what about other use cases or examples that DON’T show business value? For example, are there other applications on the cloud that are not seeing any returns on investment? Perhaps there are 20 applications currently on the cloud and yet we only show information for two of them – why? Did we cherry pick to ensure we only showed the best information? However, the argument could be made that the purpose of the infographic was to show business value and therefore we selected the products that showed the best business value.

How would you improve?

I might enhance the “value of our data products” information box so someone not as familiar with our products could understand the importance and why these three products were selected. That value box is also only on two of the three sections so I would remove one of them (or add it to all three). The graphics and colors are different in each section to clearly show the sections and products but that might be too busy; it may look better to have a consistent color theme throughout the infographic.