The Last Mile Problem - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 5

value from data is a complex puzzle; one that few organizations have solved.
Although there isn't a simple answer (and thus why so many organizations
struggle), the good news is that understanding the nature of the problem
offers a starting point for our path forward. Data fluency is the path—the
ability to use the language of data to fluidly exchange and explore ideas that
are important to your organization.
In this topic, the goal is to help you unlock the potential of data in your
organization. Your data challenges have less to do with technologies and
organizational constraints, and more to do with developing the capacity of
data consumption and production within individuals and organizational teams.
Data fluency applies to individuals (everyone needs the skills to “read and
write” and “listen and speak” using data) and also to organizations that must
create an environment that rewards productive data conversations. There are
many practical resources and topics that address individual data skills. However,
there are fewer resources for helping transform an organization to achieve
data luency. This topic draws on foundational organizational development
literature as well as best practices from current industry leaders.
The goal is to offer a framework that can help you understand the pieces
required to construct a data fluent organization. At the same time, it provides
practical guidance that you can act on. You don't live in the theoretical, so
the insights in this topic won't stop there, but instead are rooted in real-life
examples intended to provide actionable guidance.
The advice will be technology-agnostic. There are many tools that can help
you communicate with data more effectively. You will like some more than
others, and circumstances often dictate what you have to work with. The guid-
ance ofered in this topic can be applied across the full spectrum of particular
products or platforms you utilize and can help you make the best of them.
BIG DATA AND DATA METAPHORS
Data is everywhere. Peta- and exa- and zettabytes of data. Amounts that
require mind-blowing analogies, like the 40 zettabytes of digital data that
will be generated by 2020—a figure estimated to be 57 times the amount
of all the grains of sand on the beaches of the earth! 3 Though the amount is
staggering, data is also captured from more sources and at a faster pace than
ever before. In lockstep with the increase in the amount and kinds of data has
been the technological capacity to house, store, and analyze it.