The Culture of Data Leaders

 

The Culture of data leaders report identified four key cultural themes from conversations with a subset of digital leaders and laggards. The themes:

Adopt a learning mindset towards risk and continuous learning.

Create shared context through data with collaboration which promotes transparency.

Measure everything and empower the teams to examine data.

Connect data and metrics to align the organisation. Using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with team and employee buy in. 

Data culture can align an organisation both horizontally and vertically. Culture as a digital transformation agent comes from that learning mindset, transparent access to data an clear metrics. 

Using data to make decisions empowers organisations and objective measures helps drive success. 

Data Culture

Data culture is a term that has been talked about over many years. It is about using data to drive an organizations decisions.  Mckinsey state there are seven principles that underpin a healthy data culture

• data culture is a decision culture
• data culture is a C-Suite imperative, and that of the board
• the democratization of data
• data culture puts risk at its core
• culture catalysts with people bridging data science and on the ground operations
• sharing data beyond company walls is shifting for in house competitive advantage to assembling the breath of best data assets in the market
• marrying talent and culture 

Alation have started doing quarterly State of Data Culture reports . The latest report is June 2021. Within that report they are sharing a Data Culture Index (DCI) which is a quantitative assessment of how well organisations are positioned to enable data driven decision making. The index they have is based on data search and discovery, data literacy and data governance. I do think that data culture is also about data ethics.

The report states the top initiative to foster data culture is managing data governance and improving that data quality.