Data Literacy & Awareness – A Must Have To Fuel Your Data Governance & Data Maturity Success.
Many organizations struggling with their data governance adoption journey often make the biggest mistake of assuming everyone in their organization is well aligned and understands the end in mind and criticality of their plight for a governed data environment. It's not good enough that only your senior leaders, stakeholders, and main players understand this. It's not good enough for your advocacy to focus only on senior executives and IT actors, and data roles to understand the why of your governance adoption. It's equally crucial for every data citizen in your organization to embrace the cultural transformation and mindset shift of investing in the health of your data. Why having a trusted, business-ready data environment is integral to the success of your organization; why you need their alignment and collaboration; why their engagement is critical to the overall success and needed expectations required from them.
Fact: Effective governance and data maturity cannot be actualized in any organization if every data citizen in your organization is unaware of the needful cultural shift from your current status quo.
Data governance is a discipline of cultural transformation where everyone must be involved. You cannot afford to leave anyone behind on this journey. The goal of your governance adoption is to infuse ethics of due diligence around the enterprise data into the DNA of every data citizen. Simply put, governing the health of your organization's data is everyone's business.
Everyone in your organization is a data citizen as everyone lives and breathes data in our current data-driven world. Every team member in your organization is either a provider or a consumer of data. It is very important to sensitize them to realize they're part of the larger stewardship team around the data they engage either as a consumer or a provider. Educating them about your organization's strategic goals and problem statement for embarking on data governance adoption is the beginning of needed cultural awareness.
Why Data Literacy and Awareness Training for Every Data Citizen?
The plight of every organization today is to win and keep winning with their data asset. The insight in your data is your most significant investment to drive all your aspirational goals as an organization. To actualize these goals, deliberate, intentional advocacy around the fitness of the data is paramount for every data citizen.
The truth is that every organization is trying to solve multiple data demands and data pains with their data governance adoption. Each scenario and use case might be slightly different, but the data pain across most organizations is similar in their impact. Many have lived with crippling data challenges that have stunted their growth and almost brought them to a crawl before activating governance around the health of their data.
Data Literacy is not a one-time deal. It must be recognized as a continuous nutrient to fuel for data maturity journey. Every player must be carried along for success to be realized. It must be woven into the lifestyle and fabric of your people and culture. Hence, you cannot afford to leave anyone behind in your advocacy.
To this effect, ongoing enterprise-wide training and awareness around Data Literacy must be part of your Data Governance execution strategy for the following reasons:
To promote understanding of the importance of every data citizen's role in the overall success of data governance adoption.
To align required expectations and responsibilities.
To accelerate and build needed momentum for governance execution and collaboration.
To promote awareness of enterprise data health and the inherent value of governance adoption to your organization's overall health and bottom line.
To foster accountability of due diligence around data creation, engagement, and consumption.
How Do You Execute Data Governance Awareness and Literacy Training?
Data Literacy is an advocacy and training awareness highlighting the need for everyone to play their role in the needful due diligence for your data to be trusted, business-fit, and business-ready for all purposes. Achieving this level of trust requires everyone to understand they cannot engage the data they produce or consume casually anymore. Each has roles and responsibilities around their engagement as either producers or consumers of data. However, data citizens don't naturally know their roles and duties unless engaged and trained. The following are a few recommended ways you can start weaving Data Literacy into your governance adoption rhythm:
Build and roll out customized Role-Based Data Literacy awareness for each data community to highlight the relevance of governance and value added to their domain.
Appoint Data Champions to lead and evangelize every data community in their Data Literacy journey.
Embed Data Literacy Training as part of the mandatory yearly learning and development certification.
Build Data Literacy certification into employees' yearly performance evaluation review metrics.
Embed Data Literacy Training as part of the enterprise onboarding process
In a nutshell, every organization must intentionally create a cultural mindset shift for its data citizens to embrace the importance of creating a trusted data environment. The success of your adoption heavily relies on how quickly your people and culture embrace this fact. Hence, every data leader must create a winning platform for their success by making Data Literacy awareness the fabric of their governance activation. Every organization must intentionally educate its data citizens on the 'Why' of their Data Governance adoption. The narratives must the clear, the impact must be shared, and the seriousness must be articulated in a non-diluted way.
For more detail and practical help to kickoff a Data Literacy & Awareness in your organization for success. Book a Free Call with me to discuss your challenges, and we can explore simple strategies to actualize your governance success.
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