Want to Gain a Competitive Edge? Boost Your Organization’s Data Literacy

Data scientists may be on the front lines of enterprise data analytics but in today’s business, the organizations that thrive are using data throughout their ranks.

This “data literacy” isn’t something that happens overnight. In many ways, it requires a substantial shift in how organizations operate internally. A change in culture, where data is used in every business unit to inform and inspire.

Most of all, achieving data literacy helps organizations hit the goal of looking at business needs in a way that is not strictly subjective.

Data literacy is about more than simply crunching numbers. It means asking the right questions from data.

Sales teams, for example, may not need a high-powered workstation to run complex algorithmic models, but they do need a way to ask questions like, “Why is this product underperforming?” and then find a verifiable answer to that question through data.

More data, more opportunities

Traditional analytics involves looking at the past to derive almost certain conclusions. This number of products sold, this region where they sold best, and so on.

But as the amount of unstructured data has exploded, so have the opportunities for businesses—and the smart organizations are capitalizing on those opportunities.

One of the major benefits of utilizing unstructured data is the possibility of discovering new insights, even new revenue opportunities, buried deep inside pools of information.

Unstructured data also makes advanced analytics capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) achievable.

But not all work with data requires a data science degree. In fact, a large component of data literacy is giving an organization’s non-data scientists the ability to leverage data on their own.

Additionally, achieving data literacy throughout an organization can bolster data science initiatives for an enterprise by enabling teams—be they low-level to senior managers—to ask data scientists the right questions.

Achieving data literacy

In many ways, infusing digital literacy throughout an organization is more about culture than education. 

At Redapt, we help enterprises improve their data literacy by focusing not just on the hows but the whys. We also help break down the silos that are often erected between data science and the rest of an organization—silos that not only slow the use of data but can outright stop progress being made.

On the technical front, we help organizations:

• Establish and successfully implement A/B testing in analytic initiatives
• Learn how to best frame and ask analytics questions so that data scientists can more easily provide answers
• Put in place processes and workflows that encourage team members to embrace the opportunities from data regardless of their level within the organization

By increasing the data literacy of your teams, you can instill a culture where questions can be answered by verifiable data, decisions can be based on knowledge, and every team member feels confident about presenting new ideas.

To learn more about data literacy and how you can infuse data throughout your organization, reach out to one of our experts.