Happy New Year everyone! ??

In this episode of A Ride with Data Literates, we cover 4 highlights and 3 lessons learned from 2018 as well as 3 things to remember when you think about data literacy in 2019.

Three Highlights from 2018 :

1.Enterprise Data Literacy Program

With all the attention that the topic of data literacy got in 2018, we were able to launch and implement our Enterprise Data Data Literacy Program. Most of the discussion around data literacy was focused on individuals’ data literacy improvement, but we were able to introduce a framework that works for organizations at different analytics maturity level.

2. Data Literacy Foundation

Jerry and Milad established a new nonprofit organization called The Data Literacy Foundation. The goal of this foundation is to provide support to other nonprofits to take advantage of their data and optimize their business processes or find new ways to increase awareness or donations.

3. Data Literates Podcast and Vlog

We launched the first podcast and Vlog about data literacy to share our experience with others who either would like to grow their career in this field or are considering to build a data literacy program at their organization. You can subscribe to Data Literates on Youtube and wherever you listen to your podcast.

4. Data Literacy Confrences

Jerry spoke at couple of conferences such as the “Strategics Analytics Summit” in Vegas and “The Data Literacy Conference” in France. We also attended Qlik’s “Visualize Your World” and “Tableau Conference” in New Orleans.

Here are 3 Lessons Learned from 2018:

1.Implementing a data literacy program on its own may not be successful.

There are prerequisites to build a data literacy program. We recommend Analytics Enablement to organizations. This includes both Technical Enablement and Business Enablement.

To get more information about our 5C of Data Literacy click here.

2. There is not one standard definition for data literacy.

While some vendors and research companies such as Gartner and Forrester subscribed to MIT’s  definition of data literacy (The ability to read, write, and argue with data), we believe the definition is good at individual level and lacks some other key components. We subscribe to Helena Sternkof’s definition:

“Data literacy is a continuous learning journey that creates the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute pieces of information (data) to develop knowledge and the ability to participate fully in our society. “

3. Data Literacy is not just about data competencies

Many companies come to us to explain their efforts to grow data literacy at their organizations, but these efforts are mostly focused on improving individual competencies. It is important to improve data competencies, but in order to have a data literate organization all the 5Cs should be considered.

3 Things to remember in 2019

1.Focus on Analytics Enablement

By creating a Center of Excellence for analytics, you can enable the technical teams to be more efficient and lower the down time. Moreover, business users also need to be enabled by understanding standards and have proper access to the data. There is no point in making a user data literate if she can’t even get her hands on the data and tools.

2.Focus on blended learning and social learning

Most of the need to data literacy is being met by classes. In our experience, sitting in a class does not create knowledge retention. Your data literacy program should be continuous. Utilize different activities such as workshops, face to face meet ups, and other blended learning tools to increase knowledge retention and make the program relevant to users’ day to day operations.

3. Create a community for analytics

Creating a community for analytics provides the opportunity for your users to learn from each other and share knowledge. Pick a platform and create an online community to generate demand by creating awareness around your analytics initiatives vs just responding to the demands.