How Data Literacy is Playing a Vital Role in Today's World

As technology has grown, people have increasingly visualized by data. It's also common for businesses to view their workers as the engine that runs the company. As such, it's vital for them to properly instruct their employees on how best to take data and convert it into something quantitatively valuable. New studies suggest employers feel more confident when hiring if applicants demonstrate some level of comfort with numbers rather than a traditional degree like computer science or statistics.

What is Data Literacy?

Literacy is a talent and it requires workers at all levels to ask the right questions of data and machines. Literacy creates knowledge and makes decisions for you, but it also allows for the critique the data's output. To be educated, you have to have literacy as confidence in your ability to understand what is working and not working through analysis and repeated testing. Data is used today to make the sometimes difficult tasks of disseminating information (i.e., sharing statistics, results, etc.), much easier. This can be true in any field, such as education or information technology. When your company commits to being more data literate, they are recognizing the importance of using data and its impact on every department in any organization.

Why is it important?

When it comes to subjecting a giant wall of data about your product's market and sales statistics to incredible scrutiny, Excel is not the only tool in town. There are many other "giant walls" that can easily be utilized like CRM systems or marketing platforms to generate, track and analyze all data relating to your products - including customer behaviors and analytics. As digital marketers, we do have several (whiteboard) techniques up our sleeves on how we envision extracting meaningful information that could prove extremely useful allowing you to plan your next steps based on these numbers - but this carefully guarded secret will have to remain between us for now. When it comes to data culture, it can be beneficial to have a single place where all your data is stored and tracked. This way, you'll be able to make better business decisions for the betterment of your brand or yourself as an entrepreneur because everyone will have access to the most updated and accurate information that they need. You'll also discover that it's easier to adhere to security and governance regulations when all data resides in this one location because you won't have to worry about changing everything whenever one small thing happens. Another great aspect of data culture is having excellent analytical, statistical, and data visualization capabilities. A great example of using these practices is using data visualizations. This makes complex and hard-to-digest data much more easy and manageable so that even simple humans may go through large amounts of info without getting too bored or tired out.

Should everyone be Data Literate?

A common misconception that many people have is that only data scientists should devote time to developing their skills in data. This, however, isn't the case at all – instead, all employees in an organization (or business) should be taught the important concepts behind living and thinking with the mindset of a data analyst and evaluating information; ignoring these concepts can prevent growth for many companies or otherwise prove to be detrimental for their long-term success. These concepts are so important to some companies that it's been predicted by Gartner (a technology research firm) that by 2021, 80% of organizations will implement initiatives designed toward combatting the poor level of data literacy in their employees by focusing on improving this fundamental skill. Companies with teams that are literate in data and its methodologies can keep up with new trends and technologies, stay relevant, and leverage this skill as a competitive advantage, in addition to being financially beneficial.

• How to build Data Literacy.

• Determine your company's existing data literacy level:

Many organizations collect and have access to huge amounts of information. They are awash in data, with growing volumes and various sources. The majority of these companies, however, don't use this information to drive their decision-making process or value chains. In other words, they're not harnessing the power of their data pools.

• Identify Data Speakers who are fluent in Language and data gaps:

You'll need "data experts," just like you need translators for any given language, who can bridge the gap between translation and business groups, in addition to having executives capable of digesting complicated data. Spot any communication gaps that are preventing high-brow information from working its way up to the executive levels.

• Explain data literacy is so important:

Data literacy is important for every employee of your company, but it's truly crucial to entrust the responsibility of managing such literacy to only those most adept at doing so.

• Ensure data ability:

Data literacy is necessary for anyone currently working in the tech industry, but it's challenging to find an expert who can look after data literacy across a company when there are so many other areas of work that demand attention.

• Begin small when developing a data literacy program:

Don't go overboard by conducting a data literacy program for everyone at the same time. Instead, begin with one business unit at a time. Use data collected to identify "lost opportunities". Finding out in which areas you are lacking and improving your product or services based on what you've learned is important to any company's success. This must be done in a fun way so your employees will enjoy themselves as they learn about what makes their company tick!

• Set a good example:

Leadership in your organization should encourage everyone to absolutely use data insights for making better and faster decisions that will then allow the rest of the team to trust their instincts because they'll already have the data that proves something is going one way or another. Insist on any new product or service proposals being backed up with relevant data and analytics to convince the rest of the team that it's a good idea. This ultimate reliance on data will eventually result in a culture where using data is commonplace.