How CDOs Can Help with Data Literacy Across the All Departments
Data literacy is the ability to read, work with, analyze, and communicate with data.
As businesses have become increasingly digital, all business functions are generating valuable data that can guide their decisions and optimize their performance.
Employees now have data available to augment their experience and intuition with analytical insights. Leading organizations are using this data to answer their every question — including questions they didn’t know they had.
The chief data officer’s (CDO) role in data literacy and ensuring that data literacy efforts are successful is to be the chief evangelist and educator to the organization.
Standardizing basic data training across the organization and creating a center of excellence for self-service in all departments can help ensure everyone can benefit from data literacy.
“As the leader of data and analytics, CDOs can no longer afford to work exclusively with data scientists in siloed environments,” explains Paul Barth, Qlik’s global head of data literacy. “They must now work to promote a culture of data literacy in which every employee is able to use data to the benefit of their role and of their employer.”
This culture starts with a change in mindset: It’s imperative that every employee, from new hires fresh out of college all the way to the C-suite, can understand the value of data.
At the top, CDOs can make the strongest case for improving data literacy by highlighting the benefits of becoming a data-driven organization.
For example, McKinsey found that, among high-performing businesses, data and analytics initiatives contributed at least 20% to earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), and according to Gartner, enterprises will fail to identify potential business opportunities without data-literate employees across the organization.
Abe Gong, CEO and co-founder of Superconductive, adds for an organization to be data literate, there needs to be a critical mass of data-literate people on the team.
“A CDO’s role is to build a nervous system with the right process and technical infrastructure to support a shared understanding of data and its impact across the organization,” he says. “They promote data literacy at the individual level as well as building that organizational nervous system of policies, processes, and tools.”
From his perspective, the way to build data literacy is not by doing some giant end-to-end system or a massive overhaul, but rather by coming up with specific discrete examples that really work.
“I think you start small with doable challenges and a small number of stakeholders on short timelines,” he says. “You get those to work, then iterate and add complexity.”
From his perspective, data-literate organizations simply think better together and can draw conclusions and respond to new information in a way that they couldn’t if they didn’t understand how data works.
“As businesses prepare for the future of work and the advancements that automation will bring, they need employees who are capable of leading with data, not guesswork,” Barth notes.
