Data literacy - do you speak this new language?

If you are able to receive ideas from others by reading, or transmit your ideas to other by writing, you are a literate person (illiterate on the contrary). Recently my 9 year old son told me a joke he heard in school:

Little Johnny said to his father "Dad, I have just learned to write". The father replies "What did you write?", to which Little Johnny answers "I don't know, I haven't learned to read yet".

Don't blame my boy for the joke yet, we may rephrase it a bit referring to the usage a company makes of their data:

An employee says to a colleague "We have just introduced in our ERP and CRM the accountability, marketing and production data for this quarter". The colleague replies "Do you think the increase of the revenue coming from this product is due to a marketing action, or a good combination of quality and price?", to which the first employee answers "I don't know, we haven't learned yet to read all that from our data".

On the other hand, Miro Kazakoff, who teaches courses on communicating and persuading with data at MIT Sloan, business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains “Saying data literacy is just about the analysis and not about the communication is like saying that literacy is just about reading and not about writing,” he said. “Literate people can both read and write.” So data literacy also means being able to go beyond analysis and effectively communicate about data with others.

Data literacy is the ability to read, write and communicate data in context.

A company with data-literate employees may become a data-driven company, not because it has a lot of data and technology to acquire it, but because its employees have the data literacy and data culture allowing them to engage conversations around data and build opinions based on quantifiable evidences.

In order to be data literate you have to be able to:

• Understand data visualization including dashboards and command centers
• Communicate your ideas about new strategies, products or services coming from your analysis of data
• Make decisions based on data instead of entertaining discussions based on intuition

As it is one of the cornerstones of Smart Visual Data SL (Zeus) empowering people by providing them with better data and insights help them to make good decisions, which also results in higher productivity and growth.

Most of the employees in the average company feels unconfortable when working with data, due to fact that the volume and variety of data they have to manage daily gets bigger every day. Data-literacy comes hand in hand with Data-cleansing (you can see my previous article about it).

But data-literate employees don't need to be expert data scientists. they need to be able to think and act with data.

Having a data-literacy plan in place may help to establish a mid-term change in the company, you can see a detailed plan in this fine article "How to build data literacy in your company"

A good first approach to data-literacy in a company is to work with data visualization and communication, since almost all employees need to work with charts and communicate data.

Once we have learned for some years now the words and grammar, it might be about time to speak the language of data.