Streamwise Blog Datasplaining Data Literacy - Does your company speak data?

Welcome to Datasplaining! A recurring series where we demystify different data topics and discuss their importance and relevance to you (condescension and frustration-free).First up, we dive into Data Literacy and its importance to modern companies. According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Tableau, there is a gap in data efforts and execution, with over half of the employees surveyed saying they lack the data skills training needed to do their job.So, what exactly is Data Literacy?Simply put, data literacy is when you can "fluently speak" data aka comprehend, explore, use and make decisions with said data.Ok, but why should I care about it?Data has rapidly taken the world as we know it by storm. More companies are investing in data tools than ever before, all key decisions are quickly becoming data-driven ones, and every team within an organization benefits from data. Being able to ask your data the right questions and understand the story being told, enables you to unlock valuable insights and new opportunities that may not have been apparent otherwise.Although the era of Data is already upon us, Accenture reported that 60-73% of all enterprise data is not being analyzed or leveraged. Falling victim to a lack of data literacy means flying blind, impeding your ability to stay ahead in any business or industry, and missing out on key business insights.But, what if my company already has a data science team?Think of data as a universal language. In order for all teams to be aligned and effectively communicate, they need to be able to understand one another. Your data science team takes care of the heavy-lifting when it comes to data, such as centralizing data sources and making data accessible company-wide. While already having a data science team puts you ahead of the game, this alone is not enough if the rest of your organization is lacking in data literacy. In order to fully utilize your company's data, every department needs to be able to analyze, understand, and interpret that data as it relates to their performance and what success means to them.I work in <department x>, how does being data literate apply to my specific role and team?Great question! Every team and person in the company can benefit from having access to clean business data and data literacy can help reap those benefits.For example, let's say you are a content manager on the content acquisition team in your company. Imagine the kind of decisions you can make when acquiring new content if you know things like the gross revenue and gross profit of your top 10 projects for the last year, including their genre and other useful project data. Or their recoupment position. Or the services they excelled on.Speaking of excelling on services, imagine being a sales manager and having all of your sales data in one place, such as your gross revenue, streaming minutes, views, transactions and ad impressions, grouped by project, channel or store, territory, etc. How would data like that help in your deal making efforts?These are just a few quick examples of the power of data when combined with data literacy.How can Streamwise help companies overcome the data literacy problem?One of our core values is that we standardize and centralize your business data, so that you can leverage your business domain expertise to understand and analyze your data. This empowers you as the business user to make better, data-driven decisions in the business area for which you are the subject matter expert.You can think of Streamwise as your friendly neighborhood data science team. We step in to do the heavy lifting and act as your data science team if you don't currently have one. If you already have a data science team, great! Streamwise can still help streamline establishing data literacy throughout your company. A few ways we fast-track data literacy are:We make data accessible to everyone in the company, across all orgs. Seamlessly access relevant data streams on a department-by-department basis.Our scalable data spa cleans your data and establishes proper attribution in order to provide you with the best quality data possible so that your data is more reliable and easier to understandOur user-friendly insights graphs help demystify your data and ensure that every department understands what data they have and the story it tells.Our data warehouse centralizes all of your data from various sources to bring the entire picture together allowing people to learn from and draw conclusions from data.Until next time - yours data-fully, Team StreamwiseP.S. Never miss a blog post! Sign up here and we'll make sure you're the first to know when a new post hits :)