# Analysis as an Experience By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2022-09-21 One way to view analysis is as a product for consumption. Think dashboards, reports, and recommendations. Another way is to view analysis as an experience. They are harder to identify because experiences are not defined by a tangible outcome. An experience may have some trinkets to memorialize it such as the t-shirt you bought when you took a trip to Cancun but that t-shirt does not define your experience. Even the photos you took along the way do not define that experience. These items only serve as reminders of that experience. If the experience was worth anything, then it has changed you in some intrinsic way. Maybe you became closer to the friends you shared the experience with or maybe you now have a habit of always wearing sunscreen. It has affected how you view and interact with the world. Analysis as an experience is challenging in a business setting where outcomes are measured by tangible items. This is found in nearly all [[Management Fads|management practices that cycle in and out of popularity]]. It is easy to measure actions but hard to measure [[All action, no progress|real progress]]. How would you measure the [[value]] of your trip to Cancun? Is it how much money you spent, how many t-shirts you bought, or how good of a time you had (if you can even find a way of measuring this)? If an analysis brings about a new way of viewing a problem that results in a competitive advantage, then should it be measured by the number of PowerPoint presentations created? As blasphemous as it may seem, not all things can be measured - especially meaningful experiences. So, is analysis as an experience better than analysis as a product? If you care about progress, then yes. I've never seen a dashboard delivered as a product make any meaningful difference. This is not an overstatement. An analysis product by itself has never made a difference. The difference comes when an experience goes with it. When the analyst walks the stakeholders through the dashboard, the ups and downs of the story, and asks as well as answers challenging questions. This experience has the potential to be meaningful. It just so happens that the dashboard exists as a memento of that experience. From that point on, that dashboard is a representation of how the organization has changed. It is tempting and much easier to just deliver a product. After all, this is basically how every business judges productivity. However, the business will eventually start to ask questions indicating that they are not getting what they need. The business has hit this point when they start asking for more insights. This doesn't mean more dashboards. This means they seek experience, but current management [[paradigms]] are largely blind to this sometimes unique area of analytics practice. Figuring out how to continue delivering on product [[metrics]] while generating insights can be challenging. But it is easy to capture trinkets along the experience journey in the form of products. Getting over that initial experience hump is a much easier task than trying to change the management paradigm. #### Related Items [[Analytics]] [[Business]] [[Management]] [[Dashboards]]