The Significant Benefits Of A Data Literate Workforce
By Andrew Pearson
The American engineer W. Edwards Deming once wrote, “In God we trust, all others bring data.” Deming’s amusing quote begs the important question — what if you have great data but no one who understands or appreciates it?
It’s one thing to have a server farm full of powerful in-memory chips running expensive analytics software that can crunch your numbers in real-time. It’s another thing entirely to have employees and executives who can make sense of all those sophisticated models.
What is Data Literacy?
In her Gartner article A Data and Analytics Leader’s Guide to Data Literacy, Kasey Panetta defines data literacy as “the ability to read, write, and communicate data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques applied — and the ability to describe the use case, application and resulting value.”
In other words, data literacy requires the ability to understand analytical concepts and use them to process information and make decisions.
Data literacy is the foundation upon which a company can build a data-driven enterprise. To accomplish this, data needs to become like a second language, commonly understood and spoken throughout the organization.
Today’s leading data-driven companies all see data literacy as a precondition for success.
- Amazon’s entire business, from warehousing to online sales to item delivery, is shaped by data. Amazon even took out a patent in 2014 for “anticipatory shipping,” a predictive shipping methodology that assembles a customers’ shipments before they have even ordered anything.
- Facebook uses AI and machine learning to test out which of its algorithms are most useful and should be rolled out company-wide.
- Adobe, a big player in the multi-channel marketing space, runs much of its Experience Cloud platform through its Sensei AI product, which runs powerful customer intelligence models on customer interactions and markets to them accordingly.
Many modern organizations view their data as an asset. However, a scarcity of data management standards, an inability to find ways to monetize the data, and a lack of data literacy and analytical capabilities prevent companies from deriving as much value from those assets as they should.
Like an uncut diamond, the value of data won’t be revealed unless skilled data architects, cleansers, analysts, and modelers can cut out the unwanted and unnecessary fragments and produce a glittering gem of insights.
Before long, data literacy will become a necessary driver of business value. It will soon become less a question of whether a company should embrace data literacy and more a question of how quickly a company will fold if data literacy is ignored.
Data Knowledge is Power
Today, there are extraordinary opportunities to collect data in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Social media and smartphones are data-producing machines, collecting all kinds of sensitive data on individuals and even corporations. Tomorrow, IoT sensors will be collecting data on an almost unimaginable scale.
Facial, emotional, and even gait recognition are being used to associate behavior with individuals, creating vast new datasets of highly valuable psychometric information. Big data and analytical programs can capture and make sense of this data in ways that could be extremely valuable to others. However, measuring, analyzing, and understanding this data will be impossible with a workforce that isn’t data literate.
Improving Data Literacy
In their Harvard Business Review article Boost Your Team’s Data Literacy, Josh Bersin and Marc Zao-Sanders offer several recommendations for companies wanting to become data-driven, including:
- Train staff on the tools.
- Build a data skills academy.
- Create awareness campaigns that educate and inspire others to use data well while providing concrete examples.
- Incorporate data into all-important decision-making areas of the company.
Although products like PowerBI, Qlik, Tableau, and Spotfire have made creating Business Intelligence dashboards simple, Excel is still relevant, even after 35 years of use. While the BI space has become extremely crowded over the past decade, Excel is still the go-to tool for data analysis. It’s not flashy like Tableau or an in-memory workhorse like Qlik, but it is ubiquitous and, in most cases, gets the job done. Finding staff who know and understand the product is considerably easier — and a lot cheaper — than finding consultants with Qlik, Tableau, PowerBI, or Spotfire skills. To say nothing of the analytics programmer, who can cost hundreds of dollars per hour for services.
A data skills academy sounds more complicated than it really is. There are various data literacy training courses available — some free, some commercial, and some produced by prestigious universities that offer both free and paid versions depending on whether you’d like a certificate.
Websites like Kaggle, Google Trends, Pew Research, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer free data sets that anyone can use to build models and explore the analytics process. Quality over quantity, as usual, is recommended. Today, with the enormous amount of education and training offerings available, it shouldn’t be difficult to set up a supportive academy.
Before jumping in feet first, however, businesses should carefully select the data skills needed by their workforce and then build a skills framework around it. For example, retailers require different sets of data skills from hotels, which require different sets of skills from manufacturers.
There are also plenty of software vendors who will be more than willing to explain how their products would work with your data. Many have embraced the concept of the ‘citizen data scientist’ and created software that utilizes powerful GUI-based drag-and-drop functionality, rather than writing code.
Conclusion
When seeking data literacy, data should become a second language. Becoming fluent in a second language isn’t easy, but with the right education, a continuous application, and a serious commitment to the education process, it can be done. Once mastered, these data skills will never grow old, and they will make employees more valuable both to the organization and others.
Getting everyone to “speak data” as a common language will have profound effects on a company, which might reduce the troubling Tower of Babel culture that permeates so many businesses. Today, businesses only have two choices — allow themselves to be swamped by their data or wrangle it, swim along with it, and leverage it for powerful analytics.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” said the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. This is excellent advice for companies wanting to walk the data-literate walk. Yes, challenges abound, but the potential rewards could truly be limitless.
Originally published at District Insights, where you can sign up to receive our latest articles, posts, and insights.
District Data Labs provides data science consulting and corporate training services. We work with companies and teams of all sizes, helping them make their operations more data-driven and enhancing the analytical abilities of their employees. Interested in working with us? Let us know!
