Keys to Improving Data Literacy in Today’s Data-Driven Enterprises
Across every industry from financial services to healthcare, companies are creating, storing, analyzing, and leveraging data more than ever before to combat fraud, find new cures to deadly diseases, and automate entire industries with data-powered artificial intelligence and machine learning robotics. Modern data integration, data quality, and data engineering technologies have made it easier than ever to access, transform, standardize, cleanse, and store data in a cloud data warehouse or lake for analysis and reporting.
Accessing all this data is great for today’s data savvy enterprise. However, many organizations continue to struggle to interpret and make sense of their data.
According to a recent National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) study, the United States ranked 21st out of 23 countries in human ability to interpret data for decision making and problem solving.[1] In a focus group of 20 sophisticated companies, the study revealed that many struggle or lack the skills to:
- Ask the right questions
- Understand which data is relevant and how to test the validity of the data they have
- Interpret the data well, so the results are useful and meaningful
- Test hypotheses using A/B tests to see which results pan out
- Create easy-to-understand visualizations so leaders grasp the results
Closing the Data Literacy Gap
Despite past investments in data governance programs, dedicated data stewards, and data governance software, companies continue to struggle with data literacy across their businesses. Specifically, helping the day-to-day worker, not the data engineer or data scientist, know what data is available, what it means, where it comes from, and how to use it for the business.
The business value of having a “data literate” workforce originates from higher business productivity, lower costs, and faster time to market. So, where do you start? How do you know you have a data literacy gap to begin with? What pitfalls should you avoid?
Next Steps
To find out, join me May 5, 10 a.m. EDT, at the CDO & Data Leaders’ Global Summit, where I will be hosting the session “Keys to Improving Data Literacy from a CDO Perspective.” Together with a panel of chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) from Deutsch Bank, Anthem, and NatWest Bank we’ll discuss the key trends, challenges, investments, and best practices that can help improve data literacy in today’s data-driven enterprise.
______________________________________________________________________
