Why Data Literacy is Critical to Higher Satisfaction and Productivity
What enterprises can do to improve data literacy in their environments.
Growth in data literacy is critical to increasing speed to insight as well as accelerating an organization’s overall level of data-informed innovation. Data literacy addresses human aspects of people interacting with data. The primary goal is to raise individuals’ proficiency in understanding what data means and their ability to communicate and share analytics insights, typically through visualizations such as charts and graphs.
A second important goal of data literacy is to increase recognition of people’s responsibility and accountability for collecting, integrating, preparing, and protecting data. This is crucial to governance, adherence to data privacy regulations, and overall success in building trust in data and analytics through internal quality standards. An analytics culture thrives when people exercise their data curiosity and critical thinking while also taking responsibility for the data.
In a recently published TDWI Best Practices Report: Evolving from Traditional Business Intelligence to Modern Business Analytics (Q3 2020), TDWI discovered where organizations are now with data literacy and how steps for improving it could beneficially impact experiences with business intelligence and analytics. As we did for our earlier (Q1 2020) TDWI Best Practices Report: Faster Insights from Faster Data, we asked research participants how they would rate the overall data literacy of individuals in their organizations. Once again, the largest percentage of participants said their organization’s data literacy is average (35 percent). The same percentage in both the Q3 survey and the previous one stated that the data literacy of individuals in their organizations is high (29 percent).
The difference this time is that more respondents say their organization’s data literacy is low — 34 percent compared to 27 percent in the previous survey (2 percent didn’t know in our latest survey). Those selecting “very low” account for the difference; this percentage increased from 3 percent in the Q1 report to 10 percent in the Q3 report. Research participants for this report have a somewhat lower opinion of their organization’s data literacy than participants did earlier this year.
Training and easing data access and interaction are most important. Organizations can take several steps to raise the level of data literacy. To understand which ones organizations regard as most valuable, we asked research participants to select their top five from a list of initiatives that TDWI research finds can have a positive impact on data literacy (see Figure 1). Almost two-thirds of participants (65 percent) chose perhaps the most obvious action: increase training to improve data literacy.
Figure 1. Based on answers from 196 respondents. Respondents were asked to select their top three to five steps. Source: Q3 2020 TDWI Best Practices Report: Evolving from Traditional Business Intelligence to Modern Business Analytics.
The same percentage (32 percent) would like to see their organizations facilitate sharing of best practices and pitfalls, which would enable individuals to help each other improve data literacy.
