Johannesburg, 08 Feb 2022
With the rampant growth of data in the world today, data strategies are a necessity for survival.
The key to differentiation is to create data strategies that convert data into value. Data becomes valuable to an organisation when it creates action directed at improving performance, meaning that a fundamental principle of successful data strategies is the ability of business data users to understand and analyse the data with the objective of creating growth – in other words, the establishment and maintenance of a robust data culture in the organisation.
Anthropologist James Spradley defined culture as “the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate behaviour”. Spradley talked about each individual as a proponent of a culture, understanding that cultural diffusion comes from socialisation and understanding of shared identities.
Ongoing data literacy initiatives require consistent, proactive support from those who understand the business and are confident with the technology.
Organisational culture is no different – people have a common identity in the form of shared values, traditions, behaviours and even language. Creating and spreading a data culture is an evolutionary process that must therefore permeate organisational culture, driven and shared from within.
While each organisation will have varying preferences for spreading a data culture, there are some fundamentals that will ensure the success of their efforts. Here I’ve aimed to summarise a few key points, based on my own experience working with customers and within my own organisation.
Most of these are aimed at changing behaviours; in line with Spradley’s observations: changing the behaviours will change the culture from within.
1. Lead from the top
Top management must drive the objective of data-driven decisions, demonstrating that it is the norm rather than the exception. Even in our own data services company, led by a group of data-heads, ensuring all our decisions are linked to data is a process that requires us to constantly question our objectives and reasoning.
This progression has taken us to a new normal, where we keep each other on track and accountable for ensuring our objectives can be reduced to quantitative and qualitative metrics that drive our business forward.
2. Focus on storytelling
While reporting on metrics is important to understanding where company performance is tracking, true value comes from making sense of the story that the data is telling and creating action to take advantage of (or head off) the storyline. A strategic data culture encourages staff to report and explain the metrics, and to propose suitable actions.
3. Reward the behaviours
To sustain the evolutionary momentum, reward the behaviours that create and diffuse the data culture. As company performance is linked to the achievement of company KPIs, so should individuals be rewarded for their actions in propagating the data culture of the organisation.
4. Speak the same language
Language plays a leading role in establishing and maintaining a culture. I’ve worked with many organisations where people use different terms to refer to the same metric, refer to different metrics by the same name and use different business rules to define the same metric – a veritable tower of Babel! Start with ensuring everyone speaks the same language – create common metrics and definitions understood by all, thereby promoting data-driven cross-functional collaboration.
5. Ease of access
Most organisations amass a ton of data, but simply providing access to all of this won’t help the data agenda. Democratise access to data, but be artful about which data is provided when. Start by providing access to data supporting company KPIs. If all other metrics are related to this core KPI subset, and if the culture of the organisation requires analytics and storytelling around these metrics, the requests for and use of data will grow dramatically.
6. Data literacy
Gartner defines data literacy as “the ability to read, write and communicate data in context” and it is characterised by “an employee’s ability and desire to use existing and emerging technology to drive better business outcomes”.
Many organisations fall short of the mark here as they believe technical training is enough to create data literacy. In my experience, training business intelligence users to use a tool does not necessarily mean they will be in a position to tell data stories. Without a focus on ongoing support for data literacy, tool usage spikes after the technical training session, then dies down as many users revert to using what they have always been comfortable with.
Training sessions should be one part technical, and four parts training on how the data can answer business questions. Ongoing data literacy initiatives require consistent, proactive support from those who understand the business and are confident with the technology. Identify enthusiastic data literacy champions who will reach out to their colleagues to assist them to find the stories in their data.
In summary, creating a data culture is about changing organisational mindsets and behaviours by empowering employees, and continuously demonstrating the positive impact of data-driven decisions. It is a journey which needs to evolve as the business landscape evolves – just like any human culture.
“In God we trust – all others must bring data.” – W Edwards Deming
Share