4 Steps to Company-Wide Data Literacy
And why you can’t afford to drag your feet.
The value of data-driven decision-making has become so firmly established in business culture, one might think widespread data literacy has naturally flowed forth. That is, if you build the data revolution, they will come.
There’s no doubt that, generally speaking, data literacy has improved as of late. As Aaron Kalb, chief data and analytics officer at Alation, told ZDNet, many people were bored and intimidated by statistics and data as recently as 2019. “But after a year of scrutinizing margins of error in election polling, watching exponential COVID[-19] case curves and learning about ‘R-naught,’ those topics certainly seem important and impactful, and more accessible, too,” he said.
Expect that trend to amplify. By the end of the decade, you’ll be as unlikely to see “data proficiency” on resumes as you are to see “Office proficiency” now, Sudheesh Nair, CEO of ThoughtSpot, said in the same ZDNet 2021 predictions roundup.
Despite the positive trend, the quest to broadly instill data literacy at the organizational level is not yet won, according to Caitlin Davey, manager of learning experience at data bootcamp provider General Assembly.
Companies such as Microsoft, Intuit and Bloomberg have used the enterprise corporate data-training program she helped build at General Assembly.
“There’s still a lot of need, because it’s a complex problem to solve to reallybe a data-driven organization,” said Davey. “We’re still seeing a lot of need across a lot of different sectors.”
Paul Barth similarly sees evidence that true, cross-functional, organization-wide data literacy is still hardly a given. Barth is managing director of enterprise data management at Qlik, an analytics company that offers data-literacy training for all its employees and also makes its curriculum available as part of the Data Literacy Project, a partnership with Accenture, Cognizant, Data to the People and others to democratize foundational data education.
“I was talking with [employees at] one of the largest food producers in the country the other day, and they said, ‘You know, we’re a multi-billion-dollar company, but we don’t really have analytics and data built into our core business processes,” Barth told Built In.
That said, evidence of the push toward increased literacy is all around. Last year, Tableau debuted a free training program, and data-science bootcamp Metis, a subsidiary of the educational services provider Kaplan, just announced a program aimed at both technical and non-technical roles. There have also been calls for a fundamental rethinking of how we teach pre-college math, to foreground statistics and data analysis and nip the data-literacy challenge in the bud.
Until that happens, companies will have to help pick up the slack.
But how? How exactly should businesses go about instilling a data culture and ensuring company-wide data literacy? We peeked inside the curriculum of General Assembly and Qlik — both of which have long been spreading the data word — to get a sense of what works.
At Qlik, the training isn’t hyper-technical. Salespeople should learn how to analyze statistical correlations in sales data and translate a set of SQL records into a time series, but they aren’t expected to build predictive AI models. Don’t discourage anyone from advanced studies, but start simple.
For data newcomers, Qlik’s curriculum focuses on concepts like aggregations, distributions and basic data visualizations. People starting with a more advanced understanding go over topics such as Bayesian inference, selection bias and cross-validation. Wherever a person slots, expect more concepts and less code.
“If you look at DataCamp, edX and some other offerings, they often are super technical. A lot of data literacy starts with an introduction to Python — and you will see almost none of that in here,” Barth said of the Qlik roadmap.
Companies should resist overeducation, particularly at the top.
