A Consumer’s Guide to Understanding Data - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 48

Figure 4-1 View of the Empire State Building at Night
We are capturing more, storing more, and interacting with more data than
ever before. As data consumers, this unending flow of data promises to help
answer questions of all sorts. It can illuminate the patterns of disease in a
population, show the areas where individual students are struggling, and reveal
the elements of an advertising campaign that grabbed the most attention.
As the ability to capture and store data has increased, you are presented with
a new set of challenges—how do you interpret and act on the many different
forms of data that are readily at your disposal? How do you make sense of it?
How do you decide what you should focus on and what you should ignore?
What skills do you need to easily consume data products and use them to
improve your decision-making? Your data literacy skills (Figure 4-2) are the
first frame in the data fluency framework.
Creating a data fluent organization doesn't just happen. It starts with people
who love using data as a tool to improve their job performance—people who
have learned to converse with others in the language of data. It needs people
who expect and demand better, more useful data products from themselves
and others. It starts with you.