Understanding diagnostic analysis
The exciting part of going on that data journey is when your curiosity kicks in and you start asking questions such as why? This means you are already one step further along your journey. In his book Turning Data Into Wisdom, Kevin Hanegan (coauthor of this book) describes the step for this approach as exploratory analysis. All of this implies that you want to find out why things happened.
We can see that curiosity has arisen, and we are eager to learn what has caused the differences in figures and numbers. We begin by asking questions such as the following:
- Why are the numbers the way they are now? Why are sales this month lower (or higher) than last month?
- Why did department X convert the most while department Y lagged?
- Why did we sell fewer products C this month than last month?
- What are the causes of these statistics, and why is there more absenteeism due to illness?
- Why is department X’s absenteeism higher than...
