Data Awareness as the essential skill in the 2020’s

Evolution is something that cannot be stopped. Darwin said it is not the smartest, neither the strongest who will survive, but the one who can adapt changes quickly. And this is so true. Sometimes we have to act with this principle in our private life, just as in our profession. I’m currently reading a book from Ken Follett about the industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th century in England. More and more machine were invented and the book explains how to adapt them and create different kind of profession instead the ones that did before. Just like what we see today at industrial revolution 4.0 with the mass amount of AI falling on us.

In this blog post I’m trying to give you some of my thoughts around this with a focus on data. Just as the above mentioned evolutionary steps the everyday work of a business person is changing throughout times. Just think about the movies of the 80’s where managers done their presentation on big printed sheets. Later in the 90’s the first personal computers started to replace paper works, so everyone should have learnt how to use a computer.

The next big step was to understand and apply those programs like Office with text editor, presentation maker or Excel. Yes, the old Excel that’s first edition was introduced decades ago, but still on of the most commonly used platform if we talk about numbers. In the 2000’s and 2010’s using those office programs became a must have for literally everyone in the organization, talking about a sales person, marketing expert, a finance analyst or any managers. I remember my first job interview in 2010 for an internship I also had to solve an excel task to get employed. Knowing those tools has become a basic skill and not only an advantage.

This is what I think is happening with Data Awareness or Data Literacy in the 2020’s. Everyone knows that “data is the oil of the 21st century”, but do everyone knows how to really take advantage of this resource? I’m not sure yet. Even we know that more and more data is available for us and an extraordinarily amount of tools help us to refine information from them replacing the “got feeling” decision making to a “well-founded data driven” decision making, I feel there are still a lot to do adapting those tools and setting the right mindset they need to understand the insights delivered for them.

But what does it mean exactly? Who should use what? Here I think we can and we have to separate two groups of people in the organization. The first group is the end user group. They are the managers or professionals who would like to have clear insights to make decisions what and how to sell, on what price to buy, or which person to promote. The other group is the analysts, who’s work is to use and translate reports and data into insights. And here I’m not talking about the BI developers or Data Analysts, who’s primary role is to transform and work with data, but the significant group of business analysts, who are more business people with a tech savvy attitude and who’s role is to translate number into business terms and perform adhoc analyses for management.

1. The end users

End users’ primary role is a business role. They are buyers who’s job is to negotiate with suppliers, sales people who should sell the product, or managers who should support their teams understanding their strength and weaknesses. It is definitely not an expectation against them to fully understand how data flows, what are the tools we transform it or it is not expected from them to create a report for themselves from the raw data. But it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t understand the core things to translate the insights e.g. from a Power BI report and to best leverage the huge amount of possibilities for their work. So what are those skills that end users must learn to keep pace with the data train?

• They should know at least how they can enter the reports and how they can navigate between the reports
• To understand the filter context, how to apply the different filters and what it does with the numbers on the report.
• Learn the core utilities for interacting with the details, like drill down into details, or to drill-through to another page.
• Export the data into excel – yes, and I might told stupid by a big group of BI devs and Analytics people – but exporting to excel is still something that is a common exercise to further investigate data or to document and plan next steps. Even to share it with some team members
• Communications in reporting platform. Commenting functionality can extremely enhance communication within the team, thinking about call-to actions, or to report a bug or asking a question to the report developer. It is an extremely useful functionality of Power BI, but unfortunately still one of the least known one by the users
• Mobile App: yes, Power BI has an App that anyone can check on the go, and it is now necessary to use a PC or Laptop to check the reports.
• Setup subscriptions: setup the data the person is accountable for and get notification if it changes
• Bookmark: create a bookmark of a specific context, e.g. showing only a state for the state’s sales manager. With that it is not needed to always setup the filters when entering the report but only to select the bookmark.

And those are just a few, but very useful topics. In the organization definitely Data Teams should take care of educating their users, but it should be a two way effort. Just as how it is communicated for career discussions and self improvements, not only the manager is accountable but the employees as well. Here now only the data teams should share education materials, but the business people should also take efforts to educate themselves with the available training content.

2. The business analysts

For business analysts this is the Self Service Reporting that I think is the most important key word. It is not expected to do the full process of data transformation from raw data, that process is done by the Data Teams, but nowadays there are so many reporting and analytics requirements, that Data Teams cannot fulfill easily. And still there are very simple requirements from business which could be done by a tech savvy business analyst but they need to wait for the Data Team getting that in their backlog. To achieve this Data Team need to think about architectures that enable self service reporting, with reusable data models, well defined and explained measures and data points. But business analysts should also understand couple of things:

• Understanding the overall flow of data how they got to the model from the data source
• Understanding how they can connect a prepared data model
• Knowing how to analyze the model and how to find the measure and data point definitions
• Have a solid knowledge of visualization types to choose the proper one for their purposes
• Knowing how to upload and share their reports with their teams.
• Understanding data types and how sharepoint sites and excel file can work as data source – yes, as data source! as still they are the best source for some kind of data, like mappings, hierarchies or targets business is maintaining.

As you see, Data Literacy is not an easy thing, but I do believe it is essential today for everyone in the organization. It has already started to become a core skill for people and those who would not spend time on it might fall into a tech dept against others. So I recommend to start learning a little bit of data and I guarantee it will be materialized in business success.