Data strategies often seem to get stuck in analytics opportunities, data science goals or new technologies. This will not be possible without people building the future and consuming the data. Let’s put people at the heart of our data strategy.
I have already got a data team so why do I need to focus on them in the data strategy? If we need a larger team then the data strategy may focus on the need to invest in expansion. The size of the team though is not really about people, it is about capacity or capability. The strategy must consider the data team’s ability to deliver and operate the future, that is still capability. To consider people we must focus on the employees’s skills in the data team and wider organisation and consider organisation culture.
Lets consider the data teams that build operate and exploit our data future. This may include data engineers, platform teams, data scientists and data analysts. We must consider these teams in terms of capability and organisation structure. The ability to build, operate and exploit our data future, but capability is not the focus of this blog. Here I want to focus on the people themselves, their skills and career. Data people are in demand in the market. Attracting them is hard work. Once we have receruited them it is important to retain them. That requires a fulfilling role, with the right tools and opportunities. The data world is constantly evolving and most data people will want to develop their skills. Providing good opportunities to develop skills and progress their career within the organisation is vital to retaining them.
The strategy should also focus on the data citizens, those that consume the data and analytics to drive advantage for the organisation. This certainly includes the majority of the organisations employees. In some orgsanisations it could be wider than this stretching into partner organisations or even customers. The skills of our data citizens are fundamental to achieve any data strategy.
When we consider out data citizens skills we often talk about data literacy. We enable the data citizens to mature in data literacy but what does that mean? For me data literacy is six specific skills:
- Identify Useful Data
- Recognise data
- Identify quality and completeness
- Analyses Data
- Basic statistics (summation, comparison, average)
- Visualise in basic graphs (Bar, pie, line graph)
- Explain Meaning
- Explain business context of the data
- Appropriate visualisation
- Apply To Decisions
- Use data to support decision papers
- Identify if data analysis is consistent with decision
- Data Narrative
- Communicating the data insights
- Be Ethical in Usage
- Be aware of biases in the data
- Use the data within company guidelines
The barrier to growing the data citizens is often not about skills it is about organisation culture, the collective behaviours and beliefs of people who value, practice and encourage the use of data. Central to this culture I think is the decision-making culture of an organisation. Do all decisions require data analysis to support them? Is the result of any decision or initiative measured with data? The availability of data, or data democratisation, is also a key enabler. If citizens cannot access data or it takes too long to pull it together then the drive to act as a data citizen is reduced. Evolving culture takes time and effort and the data strategy must consider achieving the future data ambition of the organisation.
The people dimension of the data strategy is often either left out or left to squeeze in at the end. To realise the data strategy the people must be central to the data journey. This includes those within the data team and the data citizens. We need to attract and retain the right talent for our data team by providing them with opportunities to grow their skills and careers. The data citizen community needs to expand to become the whole organisation or wider and that will require work on the data culture of the organisation.
To learn more about Data Strategy and the importance of people within the strategy, take a look at my course on Udemy “Getting Started on the Data Strategy”.
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