Data Fluency 101

If you’re not careful, it’s easy to believe that “Data Fluency” is just the latest buzzword making the rounds in business these days - give it another few months and it’ll be old news.

Allow me to disagree.

Data Fluency is a critical skill for any business that wants to be more data-driven, which is to say, every business. It’s the key skill to allowing your employees, your vendors, your partners, and your executives to all discuss data in the same way, with the same goals in mind and with similar perspectives.

There’s a tendency, too, for companies to think about Data Fluency as something that is only for their technical teams. Many executives look across their organizations and decide that they’ll invest in training for their technologists, or hire technologists that know a lot about data, and ignore the rest of the organization. Let’s be clear: that’s a terrible idea.

If your organization is going to make informed decisions, then everyone, from top to bottom, from executives to technologists to customer service agents, needs to be fluent in data. Just like fluency in a given spoken language helps to communicate ideas between individuals, so does Data Fluency.

But what is Data Fluency? At Dataploma, our view is pretty simple. Data Fluency comprises the following:

• The ability to identify data in organization processes and workflows

• The ability to contextualize data within a framework of other known data

• The ability to discuss the possible imperfections, uses, and implications of data

Take another look at that list. There’s nothing on that list that says a company needs a world-class data scientist. It might not hurt, but you don’t need it to have Data Fluency. There’s also nothing on that list that says you need a specific technology product - you don’t.

Here are three small steps every individual in every organization can take to start building Data Fluency:

1. Be mindful of what you do during the day. Every action that you take during the day is a potential data point, from opening a file on your computer to making a phone call to taking a reservation at your restaurant. These are business processes - whether they’re official or not.

2. Take note of the details of the actions you take. Are those phone calls planned or unplanned? How long does each one take? Track it through the course of a day by making quick notes on a scrap piece of paper. These are your raw data.

3. Think about how those actions might impact your job or the business. Could the unplanned phone calls be leading to sales? Are the planned calls the most effective way to reach your customers? Is your reservation policy keeping people away from your restaurant? These are your hypotheses.

I’ll talk more in a future post about how to build on that, but start there. No fancy software, no fancy degree needed. Every person in your company can and should do this.