Organizations should constantly look for ways to boost the data literacy of their employees. But this can also be accomplished on the team level, so long as leaders are willing to put these concepts into practice.
Enterprises all over the world are turning to data to solve their most pressing questions. But there are still issues that need to be ironed out within most organizations in order for them to use their data to its fullest potential.
How to Improve Your Team’s Data Literacy?
Employee competency is one of these roadblocks that needs to be addressed to help enterprises truly fly. Here are some ideas for boosting your team’s data literacy.
Give Everyone Access to Data
Data democratization is a huge trend across industries right now. This is the idea that non-specialized employees should be able to utilize data in the workplace. Enterprises are coming to grips with how much they want to spread data usage throughout the organization. Despite there being some clear benefits to data democratization, the majority of respondents to a 2019 Big Data and AI Executive survey said their enterprises haven’t developed a data culture or fully integrated data as a “business asset.”
In today’s world, it’s hard to have a conversation about data literacy without mentioning data democratization. On its face, giving people access is a learning tool, which will reinforce literacy just by being available. While presence alone isn’t enough to build a data culture, affording people the ability to uncover business insights through data is beneficial for everyone. Business operations improve; employee workflows become more streamlined and effective; and those who have an interest in learning on their own have the ability to develop useful skills and increase their data literacy.
Adopt Intuitive and Powerful BI Tools
There are tons of business intelligence products out in the world. It’s amazing how fast things went from there being essentially zero BI to today’s world of options galore. The thing is, not all those options are going to be the right choice for your organization. Finding the right balance of intuitive and powerful BI tools can pay off when it comes to improving data literacy within your team and across an entire organization.
Larger enterprises will often find they need to employ a variety of business intelligence technologies in order to satisfy all their needs. It then comes down to finding the optimal tools to be deployed in different roles. Organizations looking to boost data literacy should consider business intelligence options that utilize artificial intelligence for search-based analytics. This type of technology allows layman users to answer their own queries with a simple search engine-like mechanic. Having tools that are friendly to a broad audience is another way to encourage data literacy on your team.
Educate People
Not everyone is going to go at the same pace when it comes to understanding and using business intelligence for data analytics functions. This is why it’s essential to help people along in the process. Make time where you gather your team to educate them about how to use available data tools more effectively, while also giving some background about more general data concepts.
Showing people on your team how to get the most out of business intelligence tools is going to improve their data literacy. Furthermore, you’ll want to educate everyone on how using, as well as knowing how to use it, can be beneficial to them and the team as a whole. By educating your team, you’re not just boosting data literacy, you’re making the people around you stronger.
Make Things Sharable
It should got without saying that having embedded and sharable analytics is a great way for enterprises to generate positive business outcomes. But there’s more to it than that. By encouraging teams to share data and projects, it’s going t have the additional effect of increasing data literacy across the board.
When teams are constantly sharing analytics and other data-related business intelligence, there’s no time for people’s skills to dull in these areas. It’s essentially the idea of practice makes perfect. Teams that are constantly sharing data will have no choice but to become more literate with it, and thus allow them to continually improve.
