DLC Essentials
How to Build a Data Culture
Published by Data Leadership Collaborative on April 23, 2024
Having a strong data culture within your organization is more crucial than ever.
A robust data culture fosters a mindset where data is considered a core asset and encourages employees at all levels to engage with analytics to solve problems and identify opportunities.
Despite being so important, most companies have a weak data culture, if any at all. Companies with a well-established data culture are better positioned to navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape, leading to sustained growth and success, but it takes time, effort, and complete buy-in to create one.
Creating a data-driven culture
How do you build a strong data culture? Data Leadership Collaborative shares perspectives from six data leaders below on their experiences and best practices.
Use inspiration from everyday life. Data literacy can’t be presented as an esoteric process, because it’s the ability to read, understand, communicate, and create content with data, and that’s becoming a critical skill almost everywhere. As you begin to understand how to build a data culture, raise examples from daily life to show how relevant data has become. If you interact with a Fitbit or another brand of sports watch, you’ve already achieved a certain level of data literacy. If you’ve spent a few moments reading a chart showing COVID rates, you are interpreting data.
Encourage critical thinking about data. Thinking critically about data doesn’t mean you approach every chart or visualization as if it’s suspect. It’s more about taking a step back and asking questions before you take the data you see at face value. Is the data sourced correctly, and can you confirm that it’s credible? Is there any way it could be misinterpreted, and could there be negative consequences? If there’s an insight presented, could it be visualized in a slightly different way that better brings this theme to the forefront? Strong data cultures encourage this kind of inquiry, because people know their data may be used to drive important decisions.
Establish platforms for idea sharing. If people are unaware of how other people in the organization are looking at data, you can hardly blame them for not collaborating. That’s why it’s essential to build platforms where they can speak to each other and share ideas. These vehicles could be relatively basic, like a group in Slack, Google Chat, Confluence or even user group meetings. The point is that you have a way to share your work, ask questions, and build each other’s skills through tutorials, blog posts, tips and tricks, or anecdotes about how you’ve tackled a challenge. Encouraging this kind of collaboration creates a momentum about learning that’s indicative of strong data cultures.
Capitalize on FOMO (The Fear of Missing Out). In strong data cultures, good news spreads quickly. If there’s excitement about a new way of doing things, people want to be a part of it. If a specific department is clearly getting a lot of benefit out of the way they use data, their colleagues will not want to miss out. In strong data cultures this also has a positive dynamic to it. Based on my experience it’s as much the fun of getting in on the action than missing out on it altogether.
Find champions within the business. Data-driven organizations needn’t and shouldn’t top out at the Center of Excellence level. To go beyond these borders, find colleagues with challenging business decisions and connect them to what you’re doing with analytics and visualization. These individuals will show a passion for data and analytics and will tend to make themselves known naturally. For every champion you create in the business who supports data-driven decisions and amplifies the work of the Center of Excellence, the dividends can be significant. Once again, you are creating positive momentum that fans out through the organization.
