Building Data Literacy as the Foundation of your Enterprise Data Culture by Eva Murray 

Building Data Literacy as the Foundation of your Enterprise Data Culture by Eva Murray at Big Things Conference.
Organisations are under pressure to maximise the return on their investment in data and analytics. As analytics tools become available to an increasingly large audience, data literacy is lagging behind and businesses face the risk of missing their targets.
At first this may seem counter-intuitive. After all, organisations have spent large sums of money on hiring data experts and acquiring the right tools and solutions to create, collect, store and manage massive amounts of data. While many organisations are analysing data to inform their decision making and strategic direction across product development, supply chain, marketing, sales and support, a large part of them still struggle to fully align their people, processes and technology for maximum effectiveness. In other words, they have the data, but they are struggling to get real insights out of it.
This is why data literacy is quickly becoming an essential skill for professionals in modern enterprises. If organisations want their analysts and knowledge workers to go beyond reporting historical observations and use data to drive decision making at a strategic level, then they must devote themselves to increasing the data literacy in their organisation.
In this talk Eva Murray, Senior Evangelist at Snowflake, author, data visualisation expert and recognised thought leader on data culture and data communities, will share why it is so important to equip your people with data skills and how you can achieve a data literate workforce. Eva will also provide you with practical steps for developing a strong data culture in your organisation so you can ensure that your data literate analysts and knowledge workers can effectively share and spread their enhanced insights.
Based on her experience working with thousands of analysts over the past five years, Eva has developed a framework that provides a balance of planning and preparation followed by practical application and execution. As she shares this framework during the talk you can expect specific takeaways that you can implement in your team, department and organisation straight after.
People working with data - be they data analysts, business analysts, data scientists, researchers or any other professional relying on data to do their job - need to be equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to treat data correctly and apply tools to their greatest effect. While many professionals have attained advanced degrees at colleges and universities, where statistical analysis, research projects and surveys were part of the curriculum, this part of their journey is often years if not decades in the past. Leaders and the organisations that employ them must ensure that those working with data and given responsibility to create insights for driving business decisions, are taught basic data literacy skills and are trained in working with data. Many modern analytics tools make it incredibly easy for people to work with data but can mask a lack of knowledge or understanding.
With this talk Eva wants to encourage leaders to place more emphasis on education and ongoing development for their data professionals as well as their business people to ensure that the data driven culture they are working to build is based not just on facts and data but also on the correct handling of data and reliable internal processes.