“Everybody needs data literacy because data is everywhere. It’s the new currency, it’s the language of the business. We need to be able to speak that.” -Piyanka Jain, President and CEO of Aryng
Nowadays, data is changing every business. Data literacy is the key to unlocking and understanding data, making it valuable and providing insights that lead to better decision-making. Due to the growth of data everywhere, many companies are trying to provide data literacy training that gives employees across disciplines the ability to understand and work with data. Data literacy has helped many organizations eliminate numerous obstacles that prevent data-oriented departments from achieving high levels of productivity and quality. In this blog, I am going to explore the following points:
- What is data literacy?
- What makes data literacy valuable and important?
- Essential skills for data literacy.
- Implementing data literacy in your organization.
- 6 quick tips for effective data literacy.
- How Bold BI helps you achieve data literacy.
Let’s dive into each topic in detail.
What is data literacy?
Data literacy is the ability to obtain, read, analyze, and extract insights from data. It allows you to select the most relevant and accurate data around a situation and derive insights that will lead you to making the right decisions.
What makes data literacy valuable and important?
The biggest roadblock to data literacy is that many companies depend on their IT team to analyze data and provide actionable insights. This delays crucial business decision processes, which could cause losses for the company, both financial and otherwise. Fostering data literacy in an organization motivates all employees to constantly analyze and interpret the data available to them, and to use that info to make key decisions that will help them be more successful in their roles. This empowerment can also lead to cross-departmental improvements and impactful organizational growth. Organizations promoting data literacy achieve better data quality and work process efficiencies.
Essential skills for data literacy
To be able to read, analyze, create, and talk about data, you should possess skills in the following areas:
Data sources
You should be able to identify, collect, and then start working with data. Knowing the type of data sources you need is very important. Companies and organizations can collect data within or outside of itself.
Data terms and knowledge.
Different industries use different data terms, so you need to understand your company’s data from a business point of view. For example, in healthcare, you should be familiar with data terms and metrics such as readmission rate, bed occupancy rate, admitted patients, and so on.
Data interpretation
You will be able to interpret data easily after you’ve familiarized be yourself with it. You should be able to interpret and make observations on data trends, patterns, gaps, and outliers.
Curiosity and a passion for data
Curiosity and critical thinking are vital in building data literacy skills, and you need passion to get to the core issues of different problems. You should always be aware of information that is missing that could be critical to correctly understanding data.
Implementing data literacy in your organization
There are five steps to implementing data literacy in your organization:
- Encourage a culture of data literacy.
- Build approval for data literacy from the top.
- Create cross-functional data processes.
- Implement technology practically.
- Measure the impact of data literacy.
Encourage a culture of data literacy
You need to stimulate the proper data culture in your team first, and then in the full organization. The ultimate goal is for everyone to be empowered with data literacy. When everyone understands why your organization’s data exists and how it’s used, it can be better put to use to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
Build approval for data literacy from the top
Data literacy is a way to gauge successful data integration in an organization, and workers with data literacy skills are in high demand. Providing training on data helps everyone, from managers to new developers, become proficient in analytics operations, which in turn increases job performance.
Create cross-functional data processes
Successful implementation of data literacy within an organization needs processes in place to encourage collaboration. You should be aware of internal processes that involve data measurement, which could be used to create KPIs to encourage data-driven decisions. Aiming for a high level of collaboration will also uncover where troubles may arise when providing data access.
Implement data technology practically
IT departments should provide data solutions like enterprise-scale data integration to serve all of the organization’s information in one place. This makes the data easily accessible for analytical purposes. It also promotes data democratization, where every user can access and use information to uncover better business insights. The creation of new data sets should be a continuous process, driven by the speed with which data can illuminate insights.
Measure the impact of data literacy
Data literacy is an evolving framework and a continuous measurement, and should get better with time. Review data usage systematically on a regular basis and you will know which data sets are being used most frequently. Reviewing data usage can also help define data literacy levels for the organization. Conduct individual assessments to know the knowledge baseline, and from there create metrics and goals for everyone to achieve.
6 tips for effective data literacy
Here are 6 tips to make your data literacy campaign successful:
Employee skill assessments
Assessing the existing skill sets of your employees is the first step to building data literacy. Thereafter, companies can develop additional employee skills. This will help the company recognize what data skills it needs to improve on.
Make data accessible to everyone
Make your data easily accessible and understandable to everyone so that actionable insights can be drawn from it. This will enable users to break down data from different silos and use it to help the organization thrive.
Select the proper tools
Data literacy has become a buzz topic around the business world. Many companies have started implementing data literacy programs in their organizations. Using the right tools will help users become more familiar with data, its management, and its uses.
Provide a valid example
Providing a valid example of the use of data will help people within the organization understand its importance and encourage them to pursue data literacy.
Set a goal
You should provide an organization-wide goal so that everyone will work hard to achieve it.
Use data literacy to promote its effectiveness
You should be able to back up effective business decisions with the insight that only data literacy can provide.
How Bold BI helps you achieve data literacy
Bold BI® is a powerful BI and analytics solution that allows you to glean insights from your complex data by providing support for 150+ data sources a wide range of widgets that you can use to dissect your data. Bold BI’s drag-and-drop interface and user-friendly designer enables people who don’t have a technical background to create powerful, attractive, and interactive dashboards. Bold BI features help you build data literacy skills and make better business decisions.
Here are some key features of Bold BI:
Collaboration
Discover valuable insights from data collaboratively and help your team make quick, informed decisions. Dashboards can be shared quickly and easily with anyone in or outside the organization using a variety of export options. Justify your decisions to stakeholders by demonstrating your data literacy with Bold BI.
Intuitive widgets
Bold BI’s rich set of built-in widgets and custom widget capabilities give you the power to extract deep insights from your data. Use interactive features such as filters, drill down, drill through, customizable tooltips, linking, and more to tell the story hidden in your data.
Data preparation
Combine data from 150+ data sources, including any data warehouse of your choice, and transform it to your needs.
Data visualization
Embed data visualizations into your applications and websites to streamline data comprehension and communication. Visualizations let you analyze data, discuss it, and use it to enforce your arguments when making important decisions. Being able to do all of this not only puts your data literacy skills to use, but also further develops them.
To learn more about Bold BI and its variety of features, please visit our website.
Conclusion
By successfully implementing data literacy as a component of your organization, you can make your data more valuable. Data literacy paired with the right business intelligence tools will lead you to making thoughtful business decisions, which will help you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors and achieve your business goals.
Bold BI® helps you visualize your data to see all your important metrics and KPIs in real time. You can integrate Bold BI dashboards into your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, refer to this blog and our documentation. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ supported data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
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