Is your workforce Data Literate? There’s a Solution.

Culture, and specifically, data literacy will ultimately dictate the success of your data operations. This is because your organization’s data culture defines the core ways of working with data internally, and your people’s data literacy will decide their effectiveness. But data literacy isn’t just one of the most important foundations for data governance, it’s also one of the most difficult to build. Gartner identifies poor data literacy as the second-biggest internal barrier for chief data officers achieving success. So what is data literacy and what makes it so pivotal for overall data excellence?

Data Literacy and its Importance

Data and analytics are becoming integral to every single aspect of business. This means that every person inside every department inside every company must be able to find, understand and share data so it can be put to use in optimal fashion. That’s the essence of data literacy: The level of understanding, both of the specific contents of data and its value to the business. Without data literacy, your people won’t be able to reliably analyze the significance of data to the organization and realise its true value through identifying and actioning the appropriate use cases.

The importance of data literacy is simple to grasp. Without it, your organization will never be able to become data-driven at scale. Data-driven decision making becomes far less efficient, which is unacceptable in this era of data growth and opportunities. An obvious challenge to achieving data literacy is posed by the torrential amount of data raining down into organizations. Far from being mastered and brought under the control of most organizations, Big Data is only growing and becoming more difficult to grapple with. More data than ever is flowing into the cloud, leading to ever-more complex environments. IDC Research expects data growth to rise by 61% by 2025. But this is no future problem. It’s already the case that each day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated. Most organisations are in their infancy regarding data management initiatives and aren’t able to keep up, with McKinsey finding that most companies realise only a small fraction of their data’s real value. This deluge of data is also driving organizations to adopt more and more disparate technologies and applications to both store and use data. The complexity of modern business operations is making complete and accurate analysis difficult. 

Technology must enable Data Literacy to be a Solution

In modern data environments, data literacy can only be achieved when complexity is minimized. This is because the right technology is essential for binding the different aspects that make up data literacy together. For example, in order to analyze data well, you first need to be able to pull the correct dataset and ingest contextual knowledge in a timely fashion in order to come to the right conclusions. But nobody works with data alone. Not only do you need technology that can support accurate analysis, the ability to tell the story of that data to others is required. There needs to be compelling visualizations and key metrics available to share with others and convince them of the soundness of your analysis. For a serious data literate culture to take shape, access to data must be democratized. It must be a social, working norm within the business business where everyone who works with data participates in the building, validation and sharing of knowledge. Only when there is a solid foundational culture around data will your people be familiar with and confident in the best ways to get the most out of data.

How Alex can get you Data Literate

Alex Solutions is the perfect technology to enable your workforce to get data literate quickly, boosting productivity at every business level. Alex is an Enterprise Data Platform specifically designed to democratize and consumerize data, allowing a flourishing data culture to be built in any organization. By unifying the entire enterprise data and application system in a single platform, everything your people need to become data literate is found in one place. Making any data, anywhere in the organization, available at any time creates visibility and facilitates the horizontalized data governance programs that can foster a winning data culture. Simply consulting our “Google-like” advanced search bar allows responsible people to find the right data. From here, they can view world-leading automatically cataloged, rich metadata that places data objects and systems in context, building literacy in minutes.

If your workforce is familiar with social media or streaming websites, they can use Alex. Accessibility is core to the design of Alex, which enables both business and technical users to understand and use data with minimal risk and maximum value. Simple governance is native to Alex through the ability to easily configure policies and assign responsibilities around data. The Alex Intelligent Business Glossary combats the complexity of multi-cloud, global business by acting as a single source of truth and centre of collaboration for your enterprise. With all data and processes defined and trackable across the enterprise, governance decisions can be made on a sound basis. Onboarding time is radically reduced by providing people and teams with an enterprise-wide common language and understanding. 

No one person or department is responsible for data culture or literacy. More and more, data governance is part of everyone’s responsibilities at work. Alex is built to facilitate seamless collaboration around data. With a rich suite of social features allowing individuals and teams to work together, data and insights become shareable and actionable. Alex is truly scalable to your enterprise, so adding new applications and systems or conducting migrations will never mean that you lose your existing knowledge and literacy.

Alex Solutions was built with the future of enterprise data in mind. Achieving a winning data culture and organizational data literacy won’t be possible without the right technological base. Our platform is the single, simple and social solution to data literacy deficits in any industry and at any scale. If you want to learn more about how Alex can get your workforce data literate fast, request a free personalized demonstration from our friendly, expert team: 

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