Building a Data Culture

Building a Data Culture in an organisation

Having a data culture is not just having 1 or 2 departments using data to make business decisions. It takes a lot to become a data literate and finally data driven organisation.

Breadth of opportunities in using data

We can easily find opportunities where data can be use to make informed decisions to support almost every part of the business such as in operations, marketing, sales, IT, audit, finance, in no particular order.

We see data in:

Website or web application log data which may potentially help in improving the performance of a website or application, improving user experience by determining if there is any where the users get stucked in a particular function, or even detecting any unusual activity that might potentially harm your business
We use data in helping determine if a market segment is worth investing efforts in expanding a business
We use data in daily marketing campaigns with help to identify what message helps sell better, what products are popular, who to target marketing to, how to increase our market share, how to position the products on the retail shelves.
We may use data to identify if there is any internal or external fraud in the business transactions, such as identifying big-ticket items like art pieces sold and being delivered to a desert, or many small amounts in the transactions within a short period of time
We may use data to identify which sales person is performing well and how do we duplicate such a talent, is there a way we can learn through data and patterns to improve hiring outcome, or it is training that help the much appreciated talent to achieve high performance consistently

There is no lack of examples where we can use data to make informed business decisions.

However, the question would be "How to do this?"

A successful data-driven organisation would be one where an organisation displays a collective behaviour to use data in a systematic way to support the business in decision-making.

Decision-making is not with one or 2 departments and neither it is just for executive level management. Everyone has a part – to understand what the data means, and what we can do.

So how do we get everyone to live and breathe data everyday?

First and foremost, to have a data culture it has to be part of a data strategy which will encapsulate data governance, data accessibility, and several others elements essential for a successful strategy

This article will focus on the heart-ware part, referring to how we can get up the beliefs and behaviours to be data-driven.

1. Data Leadership

Data culture should always start at the top, and it does not stop there. I have seen organisations that have established specific data teams which involved themselves and the leaders but struggle to move the needle in the transformation journey to be more data-driven.

Some considerations for leading a data strategy and building a data culture:

Strategy needs to be clearly articulated, communicated with the rest of the organisation
Tie strategy directly to the balanced scorecard
Create a safe environment where data can be explored
Establish key positions such as data officers which will help lead the development efforts in delivering the strategy and its goals
Leaders become data literate first, this leads to the next point.

Data Literacy Maturity Model

2. Data Literacy Maturity

Similar to the traction of the well-known data maturity model, there is a data literacy model. You can drive an organisation from being in the data unaware stage to data literate and data fluent stages

Stage 0 : Data Unaware

Most companies with huge legacies tend to be described as dinosaurs. They may not have any infrastructure nor commitment to develop a data architecture, neither do they have any knowledge of the data flows in the organisation. If they do collect data, they may not have any concerted effort to capture any data for any specification data requirements, there may not be any attempt to determine and rectify data errors. In the event of any change in the external business environment, such organisations may find themselves hard to adapt and navigate any transitions.

Stage 1 : Data Aware

At this stage, a small group within the organisation recognise the use and benefits of using data in the business. This usually starts with the marketing or finance departments followed by risk management. The key drivers for businesses in the past are typically market share, profitability and managing risks. These groups of people will start to gather data that could be useful, they know what their data looks like, and what they can do with it to deliver their jobs. Most of them at this time might be working in the silo manner preferring not to involved IT, or are cleaning up the data to enable a certain level of data quality before using, or are planning to have a departmental or an enterprise solution to solve their data needs.(such as building an operational data store or data mart and some cases a data warehouse)

Mindset: Reactive, Uncontrolled, Silo

Language : Defensive

Skills : Developing

Stage 2 : Data Literate

When an organisation start implementing their data strategy. It typically refers to increasing data literacy across the enterprise. Data literacy means to be able to understand what data is needed to complete a job, in meetings the common language may be data or dashboards, data problem statements, analytical insights.

Organisations can have tailored training and workshops to help staff members speak the same language so that the organisation goals for the data strategy can be achieved. A common set of terminology is established and used. At this stage, various stakeholders through out all levels of the organisation would have curiosity, creativity and critical thinking towards data. They know how to resolve a data quality issue, and they know where the origin or the creator of the data is. They will be able to understand the data that are presented to them and make informed decision, and might be better if it is a decision made collaboratively.

Mindset: Proactive

Language : Data is an Asset

Skills : Competent

Stage 3 : Data Fluent

Like a new or foreign language you pick up and learn, you would be first literate – understand basic words, sentences and sentence structures. When you get fluent in this language, you might write a journal or novel.

At this stage, the discussions in meetings will evolve from spreadsheets, key performance indicators, and dashboards to story telling, asking the right questions, translating a business problem into a data problem, translating the output from a model into business implications

Mindset: Confident, Empowered, Collaborative

Language : Extract value from data

Skills : Optimising, Savvy

Stage 4 : Data Driven

This is the apex of developing and maturity data literacy in the organisation.

This makes the organisation become competitive due to their capabilities to use data to their strategic advantage. The staff members become effective in managing the key or critical data, all processes and IT applications are designed with data first in mind. They are comfortable with making informed decisions quicker and in timely manner, they can optimise their operations continuously, and co-create pro-actively.

Mindset: Co-creation, Innovation

Language : Agility in Business, Experimentation

Skills : Holistic decision making, Real-time analysis

Building a data culture has many facets in the data strategy as it impacts everyone across the organisation. One foundation piece is training. Training pathways can be created for different roles in an organisation yearning to be data-driven depending on which stage of the data literacy maturity the organisation is at.

We have a range of course from data appreciation training for management and business, data literacy, data problem translation to data science and data engineering. Our courses are typically tailored to cater to the strategy and training roadmap an organisation might have in building their data transformation journey. As training pathways do not based purely on attending training courses, but should always have a good mix of reading materials, completing online courses, and practising the new skills.

Sample curriculum

An example of a training for business representatives can be, as depicted in the diagram below. The courses make up of foundation (in terms of understanding and having the same language) and electives courses, and they are in modular form so that they enable the relevant skills to be built based the needs of the attendees. The learners should be able to practise their new skills through a series of workshops and clinics using sample projects and live projects.

Do contact us for more details and how we can curate the training pathways and/or courses required.

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