Data literacy — What is that

Put simply: Data literacy describes the confident handling of data. In other words, the ability to analyze, understand, and communicate with data.

How can data literacy be established?

To solidly establish an organization in an increasingly data-driven world, we recommend the following steps:

1. Establish a data culture

Companies should promote a culture of data-based decision-making. This means that decisions should be made based on data, rather than just relying on experience, assumptions, or gut feeling.
A positive data culture can lead to improved effectiveness, efficiency, and innovative capacity of a company and help it respond better to changing market conditions.

2. Encourage collaboration and exchange

Companies should promote collaboration and the exchange of knowledge between employees. By creating an in-house data community, the understanding and application of data literacy can be improved. Employees from different departments can have different insights into the data and support each other to make better decisions.

3. Facilitate data access

Companies should ensure that employees have easy access to the necessary data and can also use this data. To make it easier to handle data, tools such as Qlik Sense or Power BI can also be used to create data visualizations or dashboards. In principle, “simplified use of data” must take into account data protection regulations, e.g. personal data.

4. Training and continuing education

Companies should offer training and continuing education to teach all employees the basics of data work. Training can focus on data analysis tools and methods, but also on specialized skills such as business intelligence or data science. In addition to imparting basic data knowledge, it is important to keep teams up to date and promote comprehensive exchange (see point 1 — Establish a data culture).

5. Data Management and Security

Companies should develop and implement a clear data management and security strategy, which is ideally part of the corporate strategy or contributes directly to it. This ensures that data remains secure and confidential and is only used by those who are authorized to do so. Clear guidelines for handling personal data must also be established.

Data literacy is becoming increasingly important in the vast majority of industries and professions as the amount of available data and the need to make data-based decisions continues to grow.