These days, data is everywhere. We’re practically drowning in it. But identifying the important data, making sense of it and putting it to use, well, that’s the challenge.

I’ll give you a simple example. A friend who runs a coffee shop was having trouble with cinnamon buns. Some days, she would sell out. Other days, her leftovers would go stale. On a lark, I asked to see her sales records.

I analyzed the numbers and spotted the issue: her customers tended to resist buying sweet treats on Mondays, but their willpower waned as the week went on. So, she started ordering fewer buns early in the week — and a double order on Fridays. (I also learned that I personally accounted for 6% of her cinnamon bun sales that year. But that’s neither here nor there.)

You may be in a similar boat. You know your organziation could be making more effective use of the data you have, but you may not know where to start, or have the in-house expertise to do it.

What you may not realize is how much more data is out there, ripe for the picking. Combining your proprietary data with publicly available datasets and open-source intelligence can unlock key insights that can help you make better decisions.

Once you make sense of data, effective communication — internally or externally — can also be a challenge. Any computer program (or, these days, AI model) can slap together a chart or two. But it takes an experienced, human touch to create effective data visualizations and tell compelling stories that drive people to action.

During my time as a senior reporter & data journalist with CBC News, I specialized in extracting meaning from raw datasets and translating numbers into narratives.

Amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I became a go-to source of information for the public, with a combination of automated data tools and personal storytelling. More recently, I employed data and coding skills to help make sense of the federal carbon tax, Alberta’s rapid population growth, our increasingly smoky summers, ballooning car insurance premiums, trends in alcohol and cannabis consumption and declines in Canada-U.S. travel, to name a few.

My background as a journalist also gives me broad, cross-disciplinary knowledge, and the ability to connect the dots between data across different sectors.

If you’ve got the sense that you could be getting more out of the sea of data we’re all swimming in, let’s talk possibilities.