Is Improved Data Literacy Really THAT Important for My Business?

Why do your business team members need to be data literate? If your business is like most, it struggles to keep up with trends and to understand whether, when and how to implement enterprise-wide initiatives. You must convince your senior team and board of directors that these changes (which may be time-consuming and costly) are worth the effort. So, when a business manager says that her/his team needs to be more data literate, these same questions will arise.

Why do you need to improve data literacy and, if you do, how do you transform your business team? Data Literacy is important because it allows business users at every level to use all the data you gather within your systems and solutions. You may be entering data to track sales in reports or to comply with industry or government reporting needs for accounting and financial investment. BUT, that data, along with all the other data buried in your enterprise systems is your most important asset! If you are to understand what objectives you will meet, what tasks and processes are supporting these objectives and where you need to make changes, you need team members who can gather, filter and analyze data and understand the results.

With this kind of skill, team members can use data to make the best decisions, to find opportunities, to share and collaborate and to make the best recommendations to advance the interests of the team and the organization. If you want to implement this kind of capability and encourage data literacy, you will need a digital transformation (first and foremost) to review your systems and solutions, ensure that systems are integrated so that you can automate processes and approval tasks wherever possible AND you will need augmented analytics that your team can use without data science skills.

Allow your team members to leverage their own professional skills, developed throughout their career, and apply those skills to the review and analysis of data. If you provide easy augmented analytics tools, you give your team flexible dashboards and reporting capability so they can share information. You can encourage power users and champions to use and share data and create data popularity and improved data literacy.

This kind of data literacy and digital transformation initiative require a culture shift and continuous improvement within and across the organization. Engaging an expert IT consultant to help your business succeed and is an important factor in planning and implementing this kind of comprehensive enterprise-wide plan.

Leverage the power of Data Literacy, and provide support for Digital Transformation. Read our White Paper ‘Preparing Your Business For Digital Transformation (Dx) And Data Literacy.’

, , , , , , , ,