The Role of Tech Comm in Improving Analytics Through Standards

Today’s enterprises are heavily reliant on data—for making strategic decisions, telling a story, responding quickly in a crisis, and more. Like writers, dashboard and visualization developers benefit from standards, templates, and guidelines, as do their users.

At Michigan Medicine (the University of Michigan’s health system), an enterprise data division convened a small team with combined expertise in business intelligence (BI) and content development. Our goal: To develop a set of standards and guidelines for use by those in our division who are responsible for developing many of the dashboards used throughout the health system.

What would seem to be a simple task was more involved than you might expect. BI analytics tools like Tableau are making it easier to create all manner of visualizations. However, organizations need to ensure their developers are choosing the best visualization types and their customers are interpreting these visualizations correctly and consistently.

In this session, Mary Jo shows how technical communication professionals experienced in documenting standards and simplifying complex messages can play an important role in improving the usability of analytics through discovering, defining, and rolling out visualization standards.