Kevin van der Merwe, sales director and data literacy champion at iOCO Qlik, will be presenting on how to overcome the challenges to building a data-driven culture at the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit, to be held from 7 to 9 March, at The Maslow Hotel in Sandton.
Van der Merwe has been spreading the awareness and importance of data literacy to many companies across Africa and beyond, and has thoughts on how to get management and employee buy-in.
He says the benefits of a data-driven culture include improved decision-making, increased efficiency and productivity, and the ability to identify new business opportunities.
However, building such a culture can be challenging, especially when it comes to the people aspect – and specifically the shortage of data-fluent individuals in organisations.
“While data experts are typically in specialist roles or in IT, other employees often lack the necessary skills. This challenge is only getting worse due to the current shortage of data skills worldwide and the explosion of data streaming into organisations,” he adds.
So, how can organisations address this challenge?
According to Van der Merwe, the answer is partnerships that can help improve data culture and productivity:
- Partnership with the data-fluent: To improve data literacy across the organisation, it's important to develop data champion programs and courses that help employees from different departments improve their acumen, language, knowledge, and data skills. By working together, data and business experts can build a shared understanding and a culture of data-driven decision-making.
- Partnership with service providers: Augment skills shortage: Outsourcing parts of the process of improving data fluency to a trusted specialist partner can help fast-track progress. For instance, data literacy as a service can help organisations quickly fill skill gaps in the business community and get more out of their existing data assists.
- Partnership with technology: Technological innovations have been driving productivity improvements for centuries. By partnering with technology, organisations can stay ahead of the curve and leverage the latest advancements in AI and robotic process automation to supercharge productivity once again.
“It's worth noting that technologies like AI and RPA are just showing glimpses of what's possible when we learn to operate with these tools in the context of productivity superchargers. To capitalise on these trends, organisations need to adapt, automate manual and repetitive tasks, and partner with business to scale up and scale out their analytical capability,” says Van der Merwe.
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