Data literate means the competence to understand, share and have a meaningful conversation related to data. It helps the business to flawlessly implement the existing and evolving technologies. Data literacy is the core element of digital dexterity….an employee’s capability to use the existing and advanced technology for extracting better business outcomes. It is predicted that data literacy will be important in increasing business value by 2023.
Poor literacy is regarded as a massive internal blockage for CDOs’ [Chief Data Officers] success. CDOs are familiar that there is an intrinsic demand for data-driven decision-making to obtain measurable business goals and outcomes. This is a huge challenge, but not impossible. The CODs can take steps to build a data-literate workforce.
Assess data literacy rate in your company
EWsolutions is a data literacy consulting firm that can help you in assessment as well as design a data literacy training program. Answer the following questions to assess the data literacy level in your company.
- How many employees can interpret simple statistical operations like judge averages or correlations?
- How many managers can use accurate, relevant, and concrete figures to create a business case?
- How many managers are capable to explain the processes or systems output clearly?
- How many customers really appreciate the data principle you share?
- How many data experts can explain machine learning algorithms’ output?
How to create an effective data literacy training program?
The CDOs need to create an ambiance where data & analytic skills learning or addressing the existing skill gap is a portion of business culture. Identify the native and fluent data speakers including the data stewards, data architects, and business analysts. Identify the skilled translators to play the role of mediators.
Now, hunt for data silos, where data is not used to its full potential. Perform a data literacy assessment to uncover the skill gaps and employ them as a baseline.
Make sure that the training environment is interesting and fun. Just don’t concentrate on presentations or slides, use puzzles, games, and other creative ways for teaching. Where language barrier exists try data literacy workshops using specific cases or relevant real-life cases. Capture the lessons and use other languages, so that the shared lessons help to create understanding and awareness about the data literacy gap. Even ensure that the teams speak data during business meetings and situations.
Measure the success of data literacy initiatives
Everyone in the company has to understand the advantages of data literacy workshops and training initiatives. They should clearly define how the training relates to their current or future roles. CDOs can derive a measurable value from their data literacy initiatives by soliciting regular feedback and placing delivery mechanism that influences the employees to use what they learn.
Businesses require data literate workforce to communicate the common data language and understand its meaning. They can identify unexpected operational glitches and even their root cause. An employee that works with a spreadsheet understands why a data set led to decision-making. They gain insight into the business domain and argue from a different viewpoint thus preventing bad decision-making because of data misinterpretation.