Data Literacy for Leaders

One of the key process blockages in undertaking digital transformation is data literacy. A particular challenge is understanding the needs of data literacy for leaders.  

Recently, I was invited to participate in a brainstorming session hosted by the Canadian School of Public Service to articulate an approach to promoting data literacy for leaders.  Our target group is senior managers and above.  It is an interesting target audience.  Many of these individuals have been promoted because of their experience and domain knowledge.  In policy and service areas, much of that may not have much in the way of data requirements.  These folks rely on their experience and knowledge to inform their decisions.  It has been a process that works for them.  

These are busy people, with a lot of distractions and responsibility.  They are often data reluctant both because they often don't have the time or the training to assess data and the insights it gives and because they don't trust data analysis.  They recognize the value of data, but the time and seeming complexity of understanding data can be a barrier. 

In my work to understand organizational data culture and data skills, we desperately need leaders who understand the strategic value of data, understand how data can have a positive impact on results and transform the organization.  We don't need leaders who are data scientists, we need leaders who are informed data consumers and data advocates.  

So what can we do to become better informed data advocates and leaders?  I believe we can become better data advocates and leaders if we take three or four hours and do the following activities:

1.  Begin to understand the true strategic value of data in your organization.  Go talk to your data people who work with your organization's data every day.  Go have coffee with them and get them to show you what they are doing, what they can do for you and the impact it can have on your business.  By understanding what they do, a bit about how they do it and the strategic value it can bring to your organization, you will begin a really fruitful conversation. 

2.  Create and launch a  Data Values Statement.  See an example here: https://www.datadrivenimpact.com/2021/12/a-data-culture-values-statement.html

3. Begin your own data literacy journey. Tableau has a free online course called Data Literacy for All that is software agnostic to promote individual data literacy.  You can find it here: https://elearning-samples.tableau.com/page/data-literacy

4. Become a data leader/advocate.  Whatever your most pressing business challenge - define the data that underscores that challenge and find out what the data is telling you.  Start insisting on data being presented in decision meetings.  Defined the three or four Key Performance Indicators that drive your results and get a dashboard built on those KPIs.  Then use, share and rely on the insights those dashboards give you. 

Finally, understand that data is at the heart of everything we do in managing people, processes and technology.  Knowledge and experience are important and when linked to the relevant data and insights can create amazing impact on your results.  Isn't that part of what being a great leader is?

Driving Data Driven Decisions

So in the spirit of transparency; I snore.  Apparently, I have snored for a long time.  My snoring was the cause of some deep relationship issues in previous lives!  About 20 years ago I went to a sleep lab and started using a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine that keeps my throat open as I sleep and lowers the incidence of snoring and related medical side effects tremendously.  It has improved my personal relationships remarkably as well.  A positive impact any way you look at it!

Recently, I came to the conclusion that I need a new sleep machine.  Mine is now over 5 years old and the progress in sleep technology is amazing.  About a week ago I called my sleep machine provider and we met to review my needs.  The Ontario Government provides grants to offset the cost of these machines, but I need a prescription from the sleep lab to get a new machine.  

In the past, I would have had to book an overnight visit to the sleep clinic where they would monitor my sleep through several dozen electrodes and provide me with a diagnosis on my sleep patterns and behaviour.  It often took several months to get an appointment. With COVID there are no overnight sleep tests being done.  Instead they are using advance digital technology. This is where the data part comes in.

It seems that the current generation of sleep machines now have "smart" technology. The CPAP units now have a built in microchip that tracks your sleep patterns, an ability to automatically monitor and adjust air pressures and have a wireless cell phone chip to allow remote access to the data.  The machine has sufficient onboard memory to record your sleep data over multiple nights. 

To get my new sleep machine, I will be loaned one of these "smart" CPAP machines, use it for two weeks, have the data remotely accessed, analysed by the sleep lab and a prescription given for a new upgraded machine.  In other words, the prescription decision is being driven by remote data gathering without the need for an inconvenient overnight lab visit.  Furthermore, that data is aggregated into longitudinal studies on sleep patterns experienced by patients over time, contributing to better diagnosis and better health outcomes. 

The lesson here is that processes that used to take high levels of dedicated infrastructure and personal inconvenience, have been completely transformed through data and digital technology.  The ability to contribute to better health outcomes at the individual patient level has major implications for enhancing health in general.  How many processes do we interact with on a daily basis that could be enhanced through data collection and analysis that would contribute to more positive impacts?  What processes are we working with today that we need to examine and improve with data driven decisions?  

Next steps: look around your world and find three areas in your life and work that could benefit from better data analytics and contribute to better decisions and impact. 

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Feel free to contact me by email or follow me on LinkedIn.  For further information on data driven impact and data driven government, visit my website at www.datadrivengovernment.ca.

The Nature of Measurement

Curiosity 

I have always been curious.  If curiosity killed the cat - I have been dead a long time! I now think that curiosity is linked to a desire to learn and I have been a proud life long learner.  It was with some excitement that a few months ago I signed up for Curiosity Stream as part of my Prime firestick subscription. Curiosity Stream is an online streaming service that specializes in documentaries from around the world.  This past week I was watching a BBC commissioned series on the history of measurement called Precision: The Measure of All Things.  It is a fascinating three part series on how we have developed greater precision in our core measurements and the tremendous impact such increasing precision has had on economic and social development. At one point the host says; "Without measurement, there is chaos."  It stopped me cold and may become the motto of this blog.  

Without measurement there is chaos.

What is so incredible about this thought is how true it is.  We need standards of measurement in all facets of life to be able to guide our activities, produce consistent outputs and contribute to outcomes that have impact.  Imagine trying to follow a recipe if we did not have standard measurements?  The recipe would not come out at all if we don't have consistent and standard messages. 

In Chaos there is Measurement

I shared this measurement quote with a colleague, who is a specialist in public sector performance measurement reporting, to get the reply; "In government it is the opposite: in chaos there is measurement!" How true in so many cases.  In the public sector we use a plethora of measurements to report on what we do.  Government is expected to be accountable and transparent - yet the measurement systems we use are anything but.  When we go to evaluate government programs and policies, how often does the report read that there is insufficient evidence or data to support any conclusions about the effectiveness or efficiency of an initiative?

Data, data where's the data?

The fact is that government is awash in data - it exists everywhere and is growing at an exponential rate. Government lags other sectors in the economy in understanding and analysing that data. Furthermore, because analysing data is sometimes hard to do, we tend to focus on analysing the data that is readily available and hope that will suffice.  Government is amazingly good at measuring outputs - the stuff we produce - but has greater difficulty measuring the impact on society and stakeholders an intervention is designed to achieve.  We need to do a better job and move from "in chaos there is measurement" to mastering the chaos through effective measurement and data analytics.

Feel free to contact me by email or follow me on LinkedIn.