The role of Chief Data Officer (CDO) is new enough that fellow employees feel a bit fuzzy about it. To them, there is the company, with its day-to-day shopkeeping, and then there is the CDO, who occasionally steps out of the sterilized data lab to hand down some mathematical algorithms. But now companies are finding that to optimize Big Data, they have to make it real to everyone in an organization. To do that, new methods for translating it into plain English — or, better, non-verbal forms — are helpful.

Sign language

Allen Crane, assistant VP of Applied Analytics at USAA, spoke about the data democratization efforts happening at his own company. “We’re only going to grow our organizations and data and data scientists and analysts if we can communicate to the rest of the organization our value, and the key to creating that value is: They can see themselves in our data,” he said.

Crane told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit that data scientists have to speak a universal language, and he finds simple visualizations to be remarkably effective.

“Storytelling is not just about who has the most colors on a slide or animation of your bubble charts and things like that,” he said. “Sometimes the best stories are told with the most simple charts, because they resonate with your customers.”

Communication catch-up

Cortnie Abercrombie, Global Cognitive Offerings leader at IBM, who also spoke to theCUBE hosts, said, “I think a lot of executives don’t really know to invest in that change management that goes with [Big Data], that you need to change philosophies and mindsets and slowly introduce visualizations and things that get people slowly on board as opposed to just throwing it at them and saying, ‘Here. Believe it.'”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE