Data Literacy
Do your decision makers “speak data?”
Data literacy empowers employees to understand and communicate data in context, enabling data-driven decision making at all levels of the organization.
Businesses of all sizes and across all industries are drinking from a firehose of data — data that can be translated into business intelligence to uncover opportunities and create competitive advantages. While organizations have traditionally turned to their data professionals for this task, the job is now too enormous for a small group of specialists to handle alone.
If organizations are to harness the power of data, everyday decision-makers must be equipped to analyze, interpret, and leverage information for themselves in real time.
In other words, they need data literacy.
94% of business decision makers who use data in their current roles agree that data helps them do their jobs better.
What is data literacy?
Gartner defines data literacy as “the ability to read, write, and communicate data in context.” Data-literate employees have the basic skills and knowledge they need not only to read and understand data dashboards, but also to leverage their understanding in making data-driven business decisions.
Data literacy is…
Basic
Not everyone needs to become a data scientist. Data literacy refers to the basic skills and knowledge team members need to understand, interpret, and take action on data.
Flexible
Even if the organization as a whole is not yet on board, individual teams and departments can leverage data literacy to improve their results, and individuals can learn how to tap into data to make better-informed decisions.
Continuous
Data sources, organizations, and environments are always changing. For the business to continue leveraging data as a strategic asset and nurturing a data culture, the data literacy program must evolve as well.
Why is data literacy important?
What do Netflix, Airbnb, Amazon, and Uber have in common? They’re all data-driven organizations who disrupted their industries, sending more established competitors scrambling to keep pace or face extinction. In industries ranging from healthcare to financial services to retail, businesses that can tap into the power of their data position themselves to lead the pack.
As the volume, variety, and velocity of information flooding into organizations continues to increase, decision makers can no longer rely solely on data professionals to translate data into actionable business intelligence. While BI tools can provide data directly to business users in a user-friendly format, these tools will likely go unused if employees lack the ability to bridge the gap between data and action.
Data-literate business users have the cognitive tools to make data-driven decisions in real time, while data professionals remain free to focus their efforts on more complex problems.
Benefits of Data Literacy
Faster, better-informed business decisions
Data professionals able to focus on complex tasks
Improved ROI of business intelligence tools
When Airbnb established Data University, their custom data education program, daily usage of the company’s data platform grew by 50% within 6 months.
How Logic20/20 can help
Logic20/20 applies our proven change management process to ensure alignment among leaders, stakeholders, and users in designing and executing effective data literacy programs. From initial assessments through user adoption and continuous improvement, our team of experts delivers the resources and support needed to empower decision makers to use data effectively, regardless of technical skill level. We take a practical approach to enabling data literacy on a project-by-project basis while also maintaining the wider strategic vision of a data culture that can guide our clients through the data literacy journey.
Ready to start building a more data-literate workforce? Let’s talk.
