By | Bernard Marr | Internationally best-selling author, keynote speaker, futurist, and strategic business & technology advisor
How data literate is your organization? If your company is like most of the companies I work with, your organization has room to improve data skills and data literacy. Since we live in a world fueled by data and businesses that have people with the relevant skills to extract insights from this data perform much better and outperform competitors, data literacy is one of the most important skills to build today.
Data Literacy is Important for Any Business
Data isn’t beneficial to your organization until it gets put to use for your organization. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a business that isn’t collecting some data that could be leveraged to improve business. Unfortunately, too many companies are falling behind because they aren’t data literate. Data literacy is as important to this century as reading/writing literacy was in the past century.
Some companies have tried to increase data literacy by hiring external data experts to join the organization. The issue with this strategy is that it is typically very expensive and when data analytics needs to all funnel through these people with data skills, bottlenecks are created.
I recommend you broaden out your data expertise throughout your organization. Create the culture, build trust and provide the tools to give everyone in the organization the ability to use data by themselves to inform decision-making.
Barriers to Data Literacy
Oftentimes, organizations believe that if they have the data and the technology in place to give employees access to the data, that’s all they need to improve data literacy. However, that’s not the case. Here are some other considerations.
