Promote Data Literacy in Your Organization

Accelerate the uplift of data literacy by breaking down data management concepts into business-aligned personas with defined learning outcomes.

Analyst Perspective

With digital transformation accelerating in organizations, lack of data literacy becomes a commonly cited reason for data adoption failure, blocking efforts to become data-driven. Making complex data topics realistic and easy to learn is a significant challenge for data leaders who are often not skilled or do not have the budgets to leverage change and resources.

Although not everyone requires the same level of data skills, everyone in the organization, including business roles, requires a fundamental awareness of data management concepts. With a greater understanding of data management enablers, people can understand the importance, purpose, and impact of data efforts, how data projects can be used to solve business problems, and the collaboration and support needed from the entire company.

A data literacy program is the key to meet these training demands, bridging the data knowledge gap and fostering a data-driven culture.

Ruyi Sun

Research Analyst, Data & Analytics
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Simplifying and breaking down the core concepts of data management into roles/personas with clear learning outcomes will enable data leaders to fast-track the uplift of data literacy. This will improve the effectiveness to upskill people, enable data communication, and enhance the understanding to roles and processes involved in data management practices.

Why data literacy matters

Data literacy is the missing link to drive business outcomes from data.

Empower Data-Driven Culture

85%

• “A data-driven culture” as an organization’s mission statement without an implemented data literacy program is like making an empty promise and leaving the value unrealized and unattainable.
• 85% of C-suite executives believe being data-literate will be as vital in the future as computer literacy is today (Qlik, 2022).

Improve Enterprise Performance

5%

• The Data Literacy Index discovered correlation between company performance and workforce data literacy. Organizations with a strong corporate data literacy exhibit up to 5% greater enterprise value (Qlik, 2018).

Everyone Has a Role in Data

62%

• From employees who are actively involved in data collection, to operational teams who create reports with analytics tools, and finally to executives who use data to make business decisions – they all require continuous data literacy training in a data-driven organization.
• 62% of employees recognize that data literacy is necessary to fulfill their current job role (Qlik, 2022).

What is data literacy?

“Data literacy is the ability to read, work with, analyze, and communicate with data. It's a skill that empowers all levels of workers to ask the right questions of data and machines, build knowledge, make decisions, and communicate meaning to others.”
– Qlik, n.d.

Data literacy challenges

There is a data literacy gap among organizations:

Data debt or data asset?

Manage your data as strategic assets.

“[Data debt is] when you have undocumented, unused, incomplete, and inconsistent data,” according to Secoda (2023). “When … data debt is not solved, data teams could risk wasting time managing reports no one uses and producing data that no one understands.”

Signs of data debt when considering investing in data literacy:

• Lack of definition and understanding of data terms, therefore they don’t speak the same language. Without data literacy, an organization will not succeed in becoming a data-driven organization.
• Putting data literacy as a low priority. Organization sees this as “another” training to put on the list and keeps it on the back burner.
• Data literacy is not seen as the number one skill set needed in the organization. However, anyone who works with data requires data skills.
• End users are not trained on self-serve features and tools.
• Focusing on a minority group of people rather than everyone in the organization or seeing it as a one-off exercise.
• Delays or failure to deliver digital transformation projects due to lack of data skills and data access issues.

66%

of organizations say a backlog of data debt is impacting new data management initiatives.

40%

of organizations say individuals within the business do not trust data insights.

30%

of organizations are unable to become data-driven.

Source: Experian, 2020.

The CDAO’s perspective

• As data grows exponentially in volume, velocity, and variety, the chief data and analytics officer (CDAO) position is extensively adopted across industries. According to a survey by NewVantage Partners, 82.6% of organizations report having a CDO/CDAO in 2023, however only 40.5% of those say that the role is well understood and that there are clear expectations for the CDO/CDAO function.
• The core responsibilities of the CDAO today are to manage and protect the organization’s data functions and foundations, and to leverage data to generate business value. The essential step to linking two main goals is through data literacy (IBM, 2023).
• The leading CDAOs, who spend less on data while generating equal or higher business value, outperform all others in three areas: data ethics, organizational accountability, and cybersecurity (IBM, 2023). These risk factors, such as poor data quality, a lack understanding of the roles and procedures involved in data management practices, and a lack of commitment to data ethics and data privacy policies, not only impede but threaten organizations from getting the most value from data, and result in distrust between data and business functions. Foster data literacy as a means to assist the CDAO to empower teams both in data departments and on the business side.

Source: IBM, “Turning data into value,” 2023.

Promote data literacy in your organization

Info-Tech’s methodology for developing a data literacy program

Insight summary

Overarching insight

Simplifying and breaking down the core concepts of data management into roles/personas with clear learning outcomes will enable data leaders to fast-track the uplift of data literacy. This will improve the effectiveness to upskill people, enable data communication, and enhance the understanding to roles and processes involved in data management practices.

Phase 1 insight

In an ideal data-driven organization, everyone should become a "data worker“ to varying degrees, with an understanding of the alignment of data management and business operations, as well as skills in critical thinking and data-driven decision making.

Data professionals need to understand the business as much as business needs to talk about data. Bidirectional learning and feedback improve the synergy between business and IT.

Phase 2 insight

Understanding and knowing your organization’s data maturity and role centricity is a prerequisite to prioritize your learning outcomes in terms of what the target personas need to know.

Phase 3 insight

Although tangible value results from a data literacy program are difficult to obtain because they are generally reflected in intangible ways, such as improved data skills or better collaboration between data and business team, data leaders should still estimate the added data value because it is the most powerful in communicating the program’s mission and vision and ultimately what drives the organization.