The Financial Times launched Data Democratisation in 2021 and it has since seen a drastic increase in the organisational data literacy. This increase impressed the DataIQ judges so much that the Data and Analytics Department has claimed the title Becoming Data Literate at the 2024 DataIQ Awards.
This award is presented to teams that prove their data literacy journey has gone beyond the data departments, building performance, effectiveness, and better outcomes for the whole organisation. The aim is to get all businesses reliant on data, and this is a journey; The Financial Times have shown that their organisation is thriving on this journey.
The Data Democratisation vision set by The Financial Times was to enable east, fast, and fun data-informed decisions. The team set about by focusing on three key areas:
- The underlying data – to improve the quality and usability of the data for non-analysts.
- Tooling – aiming to migrate to Looker and purchase Amplitude.
- Improve the data fluency skills of employees – through the creation of a data academy.
This approach was selected as it also created a recognisable hierarchy for any high-functioning democracy: high quality resources, access to resources, and education of the population to effectively use resources.
Organisational challenges that needed to be addressed by The Financial Times included:
- Delayed decision making and a slow-release cycle while waiting for bespoke insight.
- Prioritisation of less impactful work.
- Poor decision making based on hunches or qualitative data alone.
- A/B tests being released in low impact areas or being set up incorrectly.
- Lack of real time feedback.
- Inability to spot opportunities to improve user experience.
Within this, the three biggest challenges within the data capabilities of The Financial Times were ease of use, a lack of understanding, and disparate data. The team identified two key personas – consumers, who consume reports, and explorers, who manipulate data but are not analysts – to be able to better understand where efforts and resources need to be focused to achieve the goals.
The team turned over 800 reports thousands of charts into a streamlined suite of 15 company-wide dashboards and 30 niche, but business critical, dashboards. This resulted in a total of 767 users (the maximum permitted) and an average of 630 users per month. Within 12 months, The Financial Times went from four Amplitude users to over 130 monthly active users and it is now considered a staple tool.
Finally, the development of a data academy with 11 modules has seen 525 attendees and 1,173 attendances with demand frequently outstripping supply. Feedback for the training has been nothing short of exemplary with an average facilitator rating of 9.5 out of 10 and a 9.2 out of 10 when it comes to recommending the workshop for colleagues.
At the end of 2023, The Financial Times underwent a maturity assessment for its data and AI capabilities, scoring 3.3 out of 5, which marks the business as thriving, second only to excelling. This would not have been possible without the dramatic data literacy push seen under the Data Democratisation campaign launched in 2021. The business now provides a steady stream of data use cases, faster and more detailed insights, and a data-centric approach to business development.
