What is Data Literacy?

Data literacy describes the ability to read, work with, analyze, and interrogate data. Data literacy helps employees derive meaningful information about the data so that they can apply it effectively to business actions and outcomes.

Why Data Literacy is Important?

Employees use data every day to make business decisions. Understanding what the data means and how accurate it is can be a challenge. Data literacy promotes the notion that both data creators and consumers should be able to communicate in a common language about business data to better understand it. Only then can all stakeholders comprehend what the data means, make correct conclusions about it, and recognize when data is used in misleading or inappropriate ways.

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What are the Benefits?

Frequently, enterprise data is of varying quality and is stored in various applications, systems, and silos across the organization. The state and quality of data impact its usefulness, the insights employees can draw from it, and whether it should be trusted. Understanding where the data came from and how it was collected, analyzed, and visualized are all essential elements of data literacy.

Being data literate allows employees to explore and discover the enterprise data that will answer questions related to the use case at hand. They then need to interrogate the data, visualize query results to understand it and create a narrative around their findings before sharing their conclusions with a broader audience.

Data literacy helps those who interact with and manipulate data to demonstrate judgment about its trusted nature (or lack thereof), the conclusions they draw from the data, and how they apply them to decision-making. Increased data literacy improves employee confidence when making those decisions.

To be truly data-driven, enterprises need to promote data literacy and enable a culture that encourages and empowers employees to be curious, ask questions, and access the data able to answer them.

How Precisely Can Help?

Solutions like Precisely Spectrum Discovery helps you easily search, locate and tag data for faster access and collaboration across your business.