Fiona Gordon, BI strategy director, and Simon Beaumont, global centre of excellence director, set out the 20/20 vision using five pillars: a plan on a page oriented to vision, ambition, cause, values, strategic objectives, and key priorities; change management; design thinking; continuous learning; uniting the community.
Change management was recognised as essential to ensure buy-in by managers, rather than dropping the new strategy on them abruptly. Understanding stakeholder challenges was essential to move requirements on from asking “what?” to “why?”. Design thinking aims to make solutions human-centric, while analysts and the BI team needed to be empowered to create reusable data products. Playbooks and gamification were applied to guide the team and make the transformation fun, as well as effective.
In parallel, JLL has been running a Data for All programme aimed at up-skilling everyone in the business to be confident in using data without needing specialist support. The scheme is intended to bring about a culture change and is tiered for different levels of need and understanding. This is reflected in four personas: Data aware, Data ambassadors, Leaders and decision-makers, and data professionals.
Three elements are built into the programme – engagement, development and enablement – which spotlight how data is being used across the organisation, provide self-paced learning, and give supporting technology.
Another element of how JLL is building its data culture is through its business partnering approach. This established a trusted advisor role for data that bridges the function and its business stakeholders. Data business partners translate in and out of the business and data functions, rather than being domain experts in either.
The breadth and depth of the approach being used by JLL to build its data culture across a global, complex organisation is the reason why it has been chosen to receive the inaugural Becoming Data Literate award. This is to recognise the energy, commitment and vision at the heart of this programme and its alignment with the approach recommended in the DataIQ Way.
