Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?
There are six pillars in our data strategy, two of which are tackling data literacy.
Firstly, we have a pillar around Self-Serve. We will only make the necessary culture change and realise the value from data that we should, by putting the right data into the hands of those who need it. This will not be tackled by writing code or growing my team, instead we need to make it simple and accessible. So, we are rolling out Tableau across the Partnership and already have 5,000 active users. The vision is to scale the use of data in the Partnership while at the same time enabling the centralised analysts and data scientists to work on more advanced and value adding use cases.
This will only work if we have the right talent to consume data, so a second pillar of the data strategy is Education and Engagement. There are several streams within this. For most of the part-time Analysts across the organisation, we have a Data Fluency Academy which is a set of online courses jointly created with Tableau. We also have a thriving Tableau Community with hackathons and knowledge sharing which engages hundreds of Partners each year. Further, we have launched data apprenticeships with Multiverse and in less than six months already have over 400 Partners on a formal course.
Our final area to address is the Partnership’s senior leaders. Beyond Tableau, awareness of advanced analytics and data science is patchy and therefore, if we are to maximise value, we need to be clearer about the potential of the profession and where it should be used. This is work in progress, due to be launched in 2024.