Like a kayaker reading the river ahead, navigating today’s data landscape is about more than simply moving forward—it’s about reading the current, anticipating what’s ahead, and making thoughtful adjustments along the way.
Building a consulting business has felt much the same. Over the past several months, Matt and I have had the opportunity to explore new tools, connect with clients, and refine the direction of ClearCurrent Analytics. One thing has become increasingly clear: successful data analytics today is about much more than building dashboards.
Today’s analytics professionals are expected to wear many hats. Beyond creating dashboards, that means understanding how artificial intelligence can improve productivity, developing skills in data science and machine learning, and selecting the right analytical techniques for the problem at hand. As the analytics landscape continues to evolve, success depends on staying curious, continually learning, and adapting to new technologies while keeping the focus on solving real-world problems.
Reading the Current is a place for us to explore some of those changes. Through projects, examples, and lessons drawn from our own experience, we’ll look at how the tools are changing, what we can learn while using them, and which parts of good analytical thinking remain just as important as ever.
Reading the Current: Exploring the LEGO Story Through Power BI
Interactive dashboards remain an important way to communicate information and support decision-making. They’re only one part of the process—but an important one—because the best dashboards tell a story. A well-designed dashboard should do more than display numbers. It should provide context, spark curiosity, reveal patterns, and encourage people to ask better questions.
Every dataset has a story to tell. Sometimes it’s about sales, production, or operational performance. Sometimes it’s about understanding the subsurface—where additional oil recovery may be possible, where carbon can be stored safely, or where geothermal energy has the greatest potential.
Sometimes it’s about one of the world’s most recognizable toys.
In Exploring the LEGO Story Through Power BI, we use a LEGO dataset to explore how an interactive dashboard can move from simply displaying data to uncovering a much larger story. What begins as an exploration of LEGO sets eventually leads into the company’s history, its challenges at the turn of the millennium, and the decisions behind its remarkable turnaround.
Reading the Current: AI Fluency — Lessons From Geoscience
Artificial intelligence is changing analytics in a different way. As AI tools become easier to use, knowing how to generate an answer is becoming less of a differentiator. Knowing how to evaluate that answer may become much more important.
In AI Fluency — Lessons From Geoscience, we look at AI fluency through the lens of geoscience. The discussion explores what it means to use AI effectively without allowing it to become a shortcut around learning: when to challenge an answer, how domain expertise helps us recognize when something doesn’t make sense, and why some of the most important knowledge may exist across a team rather than within any one individual.
In an upcoming installment, Reading the Current: Visualizing the Energy Transition with Tableau, we’ll return to a topic that’s a little closer to home. Using a Tableau dashboard of global CO₂ emissions, we’ll explore how looking beyond the visualization to understand the story behind the data can help us learn more about real-world environmental challenges. Starting with a dataset that ends in 2021, we’ll extend the analysis to see how the global energy picture has continued to evolve—and what those changes mean for the trends we see in the data.
The topics we explore in Reading the Current may be quite different, but they share a common thread. Analytics isn’t simply about the tool or the technology. It’s about asking good questions, understanding the context behind the data, recognizing uncertainty, and communicating what we learn in a way that helps people make better decisions.