Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?
I have been consumed by a very exciting opportunity working to build our first ever pan-TfL data strategy. We have started this work by completing a data maturity assessment of where we are. We have used the newly published government framework as a model; one of the themes of the assessment is data skills, and a second is data culture.
The assessments are a way to gather a snapshot of our data evidence at a point in time. Even more importantly, they are a chance for us to convene and have conversations across our teams about how we are preparing data, how we consume it, and how we make decisions from it. It has given us the chance to delve into how we support our people who are data technicians and practitioners, but also the importance of helping those who use data, and those who produce data as part of the data lifecycle, understand the role that data can play as an enabler for better actions for us at TfL.
What has been clear is that there is a huge demand for me to help set the standards and supporting tools for those who have data in their job titles, but to also build learning and understanding of how data can be used by all of us. My focus is also to reinforce that everyone has a role to play in data and explain that data helps us be better, rather than it being a bureaucratic chore.
This is where our data literacy work comes in. We are crafting our data strategy and setting an organisational model for how we are planning to deliver it. There is still work to be done on how specifically we are going to build out our literacy programme, but there is a huge groundswell of support for us to make this happen in the 2024-25 financial year. It is a very exciting time for me to be in my role and I cannot wait to make this happen.