For many businesses and organisations, there is an urgent need for employees to be data literates. This is as organisations continue to enhance business efficiency by implementing efficient strategies that are backed by relevant data. Many 21st century businesses and organisations as a corporate policy usually ensure that their employees both new and old, be data literates to help them fit properly into long-term strategic plans.
What is enterprise data literacy?
Data literacy in enterprises and organisations is the ability for an organisation or an individual to understand, communicate, and write in context data. Data literacy includes the ability of the party to understand data sources, their components, analytical methods, applied techniques, and so on. Data literacy would also include the ability of individuals or companies to describe various use cases, applications, and resultant values while understanding also how to adhere to data safety and security systems.
Why do enterprises need to become data literates?
With enterprise data literacy, your organisation can make strategic decisions that are backed by facts. Furthermore, you can implement this data to be able to unearth fresh opportunities and insights for your business. The future of an enterprise is the ability to harvest relevant data and apply them to realise long-term business objectives.
Types of data used by businesses
Due to all the different uncertainties that need to be weighed, it can be a challenging task to collect a wide range of data. What is even more puzzling is the fact that there are many types of data. They are:
1) Quantitative data: Also called numerical data is data based on actual measurements and can be analysed statistically. Quantitative data can be obtained in many forms.
2) Discrete data: This is that type of data that can be easily counted. Discrete data can be broken down into smaller categories, like the total number of people that make up a crowd.
3) Continuous data: This type of data is based on a continuum. For example, length and temperature. Continuous data can either be interval data like temperature or it can be ratio data as in weight. You can visualise continuous data with the use of line graphs. One good example reports on the profit growth of a business.
4) Qualitative data: This type of data is descriptive data and is obtained from the observations which are not measured, as in language spoken and gender. Also called categorical data, such data sets can be analysed and grouped into patterns or themes that are based on their inherent properties. Furthermore, the categorical data can be broken into two main types. This is the nominal data (data based on percentages or frequencies) and ordinal data (data that are grouped based on a logical order).
The role of data management providers
Data management providers help companies upskill their workforce on data literacy. They are experts when it comes to data literacy consulting. There are lots of data governance services providers that have years of experience with data governance. Many of these consultants have successfully implemented data for people before. The providers have been providing data governance protocols for years while working in some of the most challenging environments. Many data providers use an approach that offers a bespoke methodology and gives each worker a suitable governance program and the ability to work miracles.
