The chances are that if you’re reading this blog then you’re either wondering what data literacy is all about, or you’re trying to find out more about training or assessment for your organization.  My belief is that all organizations need to have a good level of data literacy to function efficiently, perhaps be more competitive or simply more effective; to do this you need to know that data literacy is neither a quick fix nor silver bullet; data literacy is a feeling, an understanding or part of your culture.  Typically, it’s made up of three key areas:

The other thing we need to understand about data literacy is that for the majority of the time, it’s about people and there comes the challenge!

Adopting data literacy could be a major change in an organization, you need to understand what it’s about and determine how literate you feel your organization is.

Then having achieved that you will need to understand about how you can make use of the information that you’ve gathered, and you would, most likely, consider analytics as a way of achieving that; by using analytics we could ascertain the quality of the data we use and then determine which areas are not quite as literate as we had thought.

After that, having determined what and how we need to take that all important step and make the changes that we need to ensure that literacy is taken on board in the business and that we have a method of maintaining the level that we need.

Don’t forget though that data literacy will be different at all levels of the business, some more distant from the actual work such as senior stakeholders may need less literacy around the data and more around the outputs that they request in reports from the analytics function. In this case you have to understand all the facets of the business, what they need and where they currently are.

Also don’t think that just because you say it’s a good thing, that people will just agree because they most likely will ask a whole lot of questions about how you know that. Don’t forget that attaining widespread data literacy comes at a cost. People will need to be trained to make sure they are as data literate as they need to be and that takes time. Finally, don’t forget that although increasing the level of data literacy will undoubtedly deliver benefits, those benefits tend to be intangible and undefined at the start of the initiative and if you’ve been around change programs before, you’ll know how difficult they are to drive through. So, the drive for data literacy is very good news and businesses should strive to achieve it. After all, if we can all be more data literate and more careful about what we do when handling data then we can achieve more, quicker, with less friction and generally have better experiences.