Company leaders looking to gain a competitive edge must prioritize data literacy for employees across departments and at all levels within their organization.
But from raw data to business outcomes, data literacy is ripe with challenges. As companies leverage data and analytics tools and modernize their infrastructure, migrating to the cloud or hybrid cloud, data literacy becomes essential.
Knowing when data is fit for business and how to store data, meet compliance and governance demands, and clean data for business intelligence dashboards or AI and machine learning, predictive technologies are at the core of data literacy. And always bear in mind that data that is not important anymore, needs to be eliminated. You must follow the rules of the National Privacy Commission and adhere to data privacy issues!
Why is data literacy important for your business?
Data literacy enables everyone in the organization to ask the right questions, gather the right data and connect the right data points to derive meaningful and actionable business insights. It even ensures employees understand how to manage and use data in ways that are ethical and compliant.
As such, data literacy skills and culture have shifted from being strictly technology-industry related to essential for all business operations. All departments and roles within an organization need to be data literate; this includes leaders, managers, C-suite executives and even board members.
Leaders and executives need to understand the basic principles of data to make better decisions, approve new software or projects, and understand presentations and communications. Leaders are also responsible for building a strong data literacy culture throughout the entire organization. They must become data literacy ambassadors and lead by example.
Benefits of data literacy
Data literacy can help individuals and organizations improve customer service, reduce costs and increase profits, manage risk more effectively, make better use of resources, create a more data-driven culture and build stronger data governance postures. These improvements come about because of several key benefits of data literacy:
* Improved decision-making: Data literacy helps individuals and organizations make better decisions by providing them with the ability to understand and analyze data.
* Increased productivity: Data literacy increases visualization and analytics, which in turn affects performance. This allows companies to solve problems more rapidly and efficiently, as well as increasing sales and production or decreasing costs and risks.
* Increased reputation and innovation: Through data literacy, companies can build brand reputation benefiting their workers and customers, and by fostering innovation, they can be first in line for new opportunities and technologies.
* Enhanced communication: Understanding data enables employees to better communicate complex data analysis clearly and concisely, thus improving collaboration.
What are the important data literacy skills?
1. Data types and structures - Understanding data as it evolves through different stages and data structures is a basic data skill. This involves not only recognizing numeric data from text data or categorical data, but also identifying raw data from data fit for business or data that is poorly formatted, incorrect, or outdated.
2. Data generation - When collecting or generating new data, compliance, security, and reliability of the data as well as a proper inventory are vital.
3. Data analysis - Data analytics involves recognizing which data is useful for a business goal and selecting that data as a “feature.” There are many automated technologies today that excel in data analytics, including automatic feature engineering. However, humans are still vital for data and analytics to work well. Not only must the right data be identified, but it must be correlated with other data; patterns need to be found; and comparisons, conclusions and projections need to be made.
4. Data visualization - Creating a visual representation of data, such as a chart or graph, allows data professionals to more effectively communicate insights derived from data. Visualization can include infographics, tables, videos, charts, and maps. Both the creators of these visualizations and the stakeholders to whom they are presented need at least baseline levels of data literacy to understand the implications of the data in front of them.
Data literacy is an organization-wide effort
For organizations to be truly data-driven, it should not just be the tech experts who become data literate; everyone in the workplace must develop data literacy skills to keep the business competitive and compliant.
Businesses may not immediately see the value of providing data literacy education to all their employees, but the long-term benefits are clear: Data-literate individuals are able to expertly question and analyze data logic, applying their data-driven knowledge to each business problem they’re asked to solve.
Consequence: Get involved in Data Literacy!
Your feedback is of interest; contact me at hjschumacher59@gmail.com