Data literacy allows people to communicate with data. Data literate users can read and write data. Data literacy empowers users to ask pertinent questions and give their organizations meaningful answers that improve their decision-making processes. It is a vital tool required for digital dexterity.
Data literacy empowers employees to:
Differentiate relevant data from irrelevant data
Interpreting data and generating insights from it
Producing powerful reports, dashboards, forecasts, and data visualizations from data
Understanding which questions are important to be asked
With data literacy, it is possible to improve the user’s ability to use existing technologies and adapt to emerging technologies. To understand how good our data literacy is, we could ask ourselves the following questions:
How good are you or your employees at interpreting the outputs of your analyses?
Do you or your employees understand essential statistical functions and their related outputs, such as the mean, median, and standard deviation? Are you able to explain in plain words what the system shows?
Finally, are you making important, informed decisions using relevant data?
The trends in data usage show that most organizations are looking for employees who can work, understand, and communicate with data. According to a study by Forrester (2022), data literacy provides “dramatic benefits” as it helps improve innovation, reduce costs, better decision-making, and increase revenues. Having the ability to translate raw data into information can help you and your organization produce powerful insights. It is worth noting that data is becoming increasingly important as 90% of the data available today was generated in the last two years. Some estimates have forecasted big data to be worth $77 billion by 2023. Another critical factor is that 85% of business leaders polled by Qlik mentioned that data literacy is a crucial skill for their organization’s success.
The study also mentions that a staggering 80% of employees feel more comfortable when an organization trains them to use and understand data.
Remember, not knowing how to read and write with data today is equivalent to not knowing how to read and write when the press was invented. The world as we know it is rapidly changing, and the pace of change is accelerating. To adapt and succeed in this rapidly changing environment, you may need to learn more about:
Data analytics: The ability to analyze raw data and turn it into conclusions
Business intelligence: All tools and technologies used in generating reports, extracting data, mining data, and generating insights from the data
Data visualization: The art and science of telling a story with relevant data
Data wrangling: The ability to clean the data using multiple processes to transform it from raw data into data that can be processed by the analyst’s software of choice.
Javier Leon
December 26th, 2022
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