Tips for increasing data literacy among your employees and customers
Having data-literate employees and customers empowers your company to make the right decisions, improve data accuracy and avoid misleading BI.
Just as Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press transformed a mostly illiterate European populace into a body of readers, so too do we need a printing press equivalent for enterprise data. However much we may like to proclaim the possibilities of data for enabling digital transformation, without growing data literacy those possibilities will fail to be realized. Fortunately, there are ways to improve data literacy among employees and customers.
Though we often focus on the technologies that enable big data, from Apache Iceberg to Google BigQuery, those technologies fail without people to understand the data behind them. As Gartner’s Svetlana Sicular declared over a decade ago, “Learning Hadoop is easier than learning the company’s business,” or its data.
The nuances of data—knowing which questions to ask of that data and getting some sense of signal amongst all of the noise—are critical to master and serve as a precursor to mastering data technologies. Hence, a more recent Gartner article continued, “[B]eing data-literate—having the ability to understand, share common knowledge of and have meaningful conversations about data—can enable organizations to seamlessly adopt existing and emerging technologies.”
Unfortunately, as a large Accenture survey found, just 21% of the more than 9,000 people surveyed felt they were data literate. Without data literacy, the deluge of data will drown us, rather than transform the way we care for customers or engage employees. So, how do we increase data literacy?
Among other sources, Gartner offers a range of suggestions for how chief data officers can construct a data literacy program for their organizations. Other tips for increasing data literacy company-wide involve focusing more on data over technology, especially in decision-making processes.
As an MIT Sloan School of Management analysis described, it’s important to understand the goal. Data literacy is the ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data. The emphasis needs to be on understanding and using data, not necessarily the tools used to ingest or analyze that data.
“If we’re spending 80% now on technology, 20% on data, flip it—make the technology super easy so that you can spend more time on data,” said Cindi Howson, chief data strategy officer at ThoughtSpot.
The basis for any good data literacy plan is a strong focus on data, not technology.
