Webinar Review: How to Scale a Data Literacy Program at Your Organization

Atscale’s webinar “How to Scale a Data Literacy Program at Your Organization” provides valuable insight into how companies can start and improve their data literacy programs through various levels and steps. 

The Featured Panelists: 

The webinar features an impressive lineup of three panelists, each providing their own knowledge and experience on the topic:

• Mariska Veenhof: Leading the Business Intelligence specialists within her team at bol.com, Veenhof focuses on reporting, data coaching, and self-service analytics. She has 12 years of experience as a Business Intelligence/Data Driven advisor and manager, and she coaches, trains, and mentors teams in interpreting data and leveraging it.

• Megan Brown: Director of Knowledge Management and Data Literacy for the Analytics & Insights team at Starbucks, Brown is responsible for developing the strategy and roadmap for the Knowledge Management & Data Literacy function at the company. She is also the founder of the Data Literacy team at Starbucks, which works to drive analytics product adoption and translate complex concepts for business stakeholders.

• Jennifer Wheeler: Director of Data & Analytics for the Pharma segment within the Augmented Intelligence organization at Cardinal Health, Wheeler’s team is focused on turning data into a single and innovative cloud-based solution. She has worked with data and analytics strategies, projects, and operations for more than 15 years.

The webinar kicks off by presenting a data and analytics maturity model for your organization. With capabilities such as data, access, model, analyze, consume, and insights, the model demonstrates how an organization can move from Level 0 (initial) to Level 3 (leading), which includes transformations like siloed data to shared data.

Jenny Wheeler – Cardinal Health

In Wheeler’s section of the webinar, she discusses how businesses can first think about data literacy. They must first pose several questions to themselves:

• What data do you use to influence your decisions?
• Are these decisions made in real-time?
• Are you a creature of habit?

She also discusses digital fluency at Cardinal Health and their Digital U trademark, which has three digital offerings: Digital Fluency, Digital Immersion, and Digital Colleges. Digital U delivers solutions focused on customer needs; offers customized learning programs to support employee roles, skills, and career objectives; and creates a robust understanding of technology. 

Wheeler wants to drive home some main points like the importance of enabling your organization to recognize the power of data, starting as soon as possible, visualizing data, and focusing on actions and outcomes.

Megan Brown – Starbucks

In Brown’s section, she starts by detailing Starbucks’ strategy in 4 pillars:

1. Access: create centralized access to A&I products for partners in a simple, searchable way.
   
2. Education: Develop learning journeys that can be offered to partners to help them develop data literacy and harness analytics in their daily work.
   
3. Communication: Amplify the impact of D&A through consistent and engaging messaging across all channels to a broad audience.
   
4. Continuous Improvement: Implement user experience research in every phase, all the way from ideation to product. 

She then went on to discuss the different priorities that drive the company’s strategy, and she goes through each of the four pillars, sharing various aspects of each. These include an analytics and insights library, the Knowledge Academy with several videos to support data citizen skill growth, and quarterly insight-sharing sessions. 

Mariska Veenhof – bol.com

Veenhof is the last speaker in the webinar, and she starts by describing bol.com’s mission: a next level data driven bol.com.

She also discusses how the company has built their data driven teams with several characteristics like: 

• Having a data culture
• Self-steering data teams
• Data roles and leadership buy-in
• Can interpret and communicate with data (data literacy)
• Capable of writing data and creating insights/dashboards
• Access to the right data

Veenhof then goes on to define what the company’s Data Maturity model looks like and how other companies can get from Level 1 to Level 4 through things like culture, self-steering, roles, skills, and data.

The company’s advanced program works with teams for 12 weeks to grow their data maturity, and it involves workshops, weekly meetings, intermediate check-ins, a final questionnaire, and a discussion of the results.

If you want to learn more about how to scale a data literacy program at your organization, you can register for the full seminar at AtScale.