Everyday we form opinions and make decisions by seeking, selecting and using data and information from all sorts of sources. Data literacy leads to more opportunities and potentially higher material and spiritual fulfillment. A data literate person knows where to find data, how to evaluate it, and how to use timely and trustworthy information to win. Corporate Data Literacy has the same effect on a company’s growth and performance. Traditionally the skills of data and analytics only resided in a small group of technical people in an organization, especially as new technology moves us into the realm of unprecedented data variety, size and speed.

Many companies give the difficult jobs to those that speak that the “data” language, i.e. data architects, data engineers and data scientists, as our translator or interpreter. They did their magic in a black box and delivered the charts, graphs and predictions to the business decision makers. It leads to confusions and miscommunication. Those days when we hired “data people” are arguably over. We need more people to speak “data” as a new business language. By knowing the existence, origins, methods and technology to turn raw business data into useful analytics and business intelligence, people with different job responsibilities in a company can now communicate better to overcome the challenges of data proliferation and isolation.

The data literate companies have tremendous advantage over their peers or competitors. Data literacy has been an established subject in education and library science for quite some time; it is coming to the commercial space and corporate world. Today corporate data literacy is like a conversation piece in board rooms; we hear that term and receive project proposals from vendors and consultants. We are told that data literacy is the prerequisite to successful digital transformation in any corporation.

Is data the new corporate language? Who in your organization should be data literate? How do you make them data literate? Should you start a Data University or Data Academy to achieve corporate data literacy? What role should the data governance people play? How do you measure data literacy? This presentation will demystify the concepts and definitions of Corporate Data Literacy, and its relationship with data engineering, data governance, statistics and visualization. HoChun will suggest a practical approach for the attendees to assess and improve Corporate Data Literacy in their organization