The Weekly Blog is curated content from the Evolytics staff, bringing you the most interesting news in data and analysis from around the web. The Evolytics staff has proven experience and expertise in analytics strategy, tagging implementation, data engineering, and data visualization.

GOOGLE LAUNCHES DATA GIF MAKER TO HELP STORYTELLERS CONVEY INFORMATION THROUGH ANIMATIONS

VENTURE BEAT | ARTICLE

Google is trying a creative spin on data visualization with its new Data GIF Maker.  You enter two competing data points to generate a GIF that shows them battling it out for dominance.  For example, we created a data animation that shows the search popularity between the phrases “data analytics” and “big data” from January 2014 to May 2017 as reported by Google Trends.

While a simple and fun distraction at the moment, this tool’s core concept envisions the potentially animated future of data.  One of the most popular and compelling examples of data animation is actually 11 years old now.  In a Ted Talk from 2006 with over 11.5 million views, Hans Rosling animated several bubble charts over time to tell a story about evolving trends in world health and poverty metrics.

We’re excited at Evolytics to see how data visualization tools continue to evolve and provide increasingly engaging, exciting and insightful ways of combining data analysis, data visualization and data storytelling.  Perhaps at some point in the future we’ll post a “data animation specialist” listing on our career opportunities page.  Until that day though, we’ll keep hiring and developing data viz specialists that push the boundaries of what is currently possible in data viz tools like Tableau.

MEET TABLEAU 10.3

TABLEAU | BLOG

Tableau continues to evolve its data visualization technology to easily access and prep more data types and then turn those data sources into timely, critical data alerts.  New data connectors for Amazon Athena, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and MongoDB let you connect directly to these data sources easily and quickly.  Once you’ve connected your data sources, Tableau now lets you apply machine learning to scan dimensions and metrics in your data, helping automate data prep and recommending relevant tables and joins to fuel your analysis and visualizations.

In addition to new data connection and prep features, you can now also set up data-driven alerts for Tableau Server.  To create a data alert, you choose a metric, a threshold, a notification frequency and recipients.  Whenever the metric threshold is crossed, you and your team receive an email alert letting you know when goals have been reached or when performance is not meeting expectations.  In our Tableau Training, we teach attendees not only how to use — but also when it’s best to use — such features to monitor and optimize performance on key performance indicators.

BUILDING ANALYTICS COMPETENCY WITHIN THE TEAM – COMMON PITFALLS TO AVOID

DATA SCIENCE CENTRAL | BLOG

As this article points out, data analysts must possess a unique set of skills including “mathematics, statistics, programming, storytelling, project management and domain knowledge.” Unfortunately, you’ll rarely find an analyst expertly skilled in all areas.  Usually, the best case scenario is finding someone with general knowledge in most areas, specialized skills in one area and a hunger to learn about all areas.  The author recommends that the path to “analytics competency” for these team members should include a combination of training and hands-on application of acquired skills over time.  There are no silver bullets or quick fixes for analytic skill-building.

At Evolytics, we’ve seen this perspective proven true over 11 years building our own analytics organization and helping enterprise clients build and develop their own analytics teams.  When we help an organization develop analytic resources internally, we first assess the company’s capabilities using our proprietary Data Lifecycle.  Once we identify analytic gaps and opportunities, we can then build up internal resources through beginner, advanced and customized analytics training.  For companies with immediate analytics needs, we also offer flexible team augmentation with an ongoing allocation of ad hoc support hours.  This relationship allows client partners to tap into our deep pool of collective analytic expertise as their own analytic resources, needs and priorities evolve over time.