FINAL WORD
Five steps to putting
your people at the
heart of the public
sector’s data strategy
In order to drive efficiency within a company’s business
strategy, it must operate with a strong data-literate culture.
Jordan Morrow, Global Head of Data Literacy, Qlik, explores
the steps that public sector employers can take to ensure their
employees are able to confidently read, analyse, challenge
and use data effectively.
We are increasingly seeing datainformed
decisions being made to
support and streamline operations
throughout the public sector. This is because
governments and organisations realise that
being data-driven and data literate are not
just nice-to-haves. They are necessary in
today’s digital world to not only improve the
efficiency of public sector organisations, but
to deliver the agile services that citizens now
expect. And in our current climate, this has
never been so pertinent.
But while public sector leaders may recognise
the value in driving decisions based on data,
there is a widening gap between what they
want to achieve and how well equipped their
employees are to deliver it. According to The
Human Impact of Data Literacy, a report
from Qlik and Accenture on behalf of The
Data Literacy Project, though 45% of public
sector workers feel empowered within their
organisations to make better decisions using
data, the same amount confessed to feeling
overwhelmed and unhappy at work at least
once a week when reading, working with and
analysing data. More worryingly, more than
a fifth (23%) said they felt so overwhelmed
when confronted with data that they avoided
doing the task altogether.
It has never been more important for
people to understand the information being
presented to them every day, not only to
help now but to equip them for the future.
So, what can public sector employers do to
close this gap and support their workers to
be able to read, analyse, challenge and use
data effectively?
Here are five practical first steps that public
sector leaders can execute on:
1. Appoint a data champion
responsible for driving tangible results
Public sector leaders need to ask themselves
two questions: what tangible value do they
want to realise from their data? And are they
currently set up to deliver the desired goals?
To identify opportunities that align with
and will tangibly impact the organisation’s
objectives, a data champion must be
appointed. Typically, a Chief Data Officer
(CDO) or Chief Information Officer (CIO), their
role would be to act as a data ambassador
across the organisation, working with
stakeholders to identify opportunities to better
use data and establish a change management
plan to successfully implement them.
Driving a data-literate culture is something
that no one person can do alone. Therefore,
a key function of the data champion role
is setting clear expectations for the dataorientated
working practices that need to be
adopted in every function and at every level.
This helps establish accountability for the
adoption of new ways of working – not only
for individual employees, but also for senior
leadership, who must empower them with the
necessary skills, tools and process changes.
A top-down approach is critical to delivering
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