Reactive vs Proactive Analytics – Shape the Future

[Sarah_Miller]

Check out the latest post about Data Literacy written by Jordan Morrow,  Qliks Global Head of Data Literacy.

There you will find Jordan's discussion in regards to what we should be focusing on during these uncertain times. One thing we should all be focusing on is how we can use data and analytics to help us come out of the current situation and be in a position of strength for the future. Each of us, individually and organizationally, has the opportunity to be proactive – not reactive – in analytics. How do we do this? Let's focus on three key pieces: 

1. Improve Data Literacy – How can we hope to be proactive in our analytical work if we are not improving our data literacy skills? When we define data literacy as the ability to read, work with, analyze and communicate with data, we are given a series of things we can be studying and learning. How well can we read data to understand a situation and then predict future outcomes? How comfortable are we in working with data or are there still knowledge gaps keeping us from making use of it? How well can we analyze and ask questions of data? Finally, are we comfortable communicating our results and analysis? Overall, data literacy is more than just a "nice to have" anymore; it is an imperative, and the current situation is showing us that.
2. Become Outcome Focused – Far too often, I find that organizations know they want to use data and analytics, but if you ask them what their goal is, they can be very vague. They want it to run their business, to design marketing and so forth. Organizations need to become more specific with their data and analytical vision. We don’t just want to know what happened last month. We need to know what happened last month in comparison to multiple datasets and benchmarks, and then look at how this process can reveal opportunities. In essence, you should become much more focused on what you want your work to do.
3. Drive Data-Informed Decision Making – Finally, we should utilize this time to learn more about data-informed decision making. We can develop data literacy and be more outcome focused all we want, but if we don’t know how to turn that into a decision, it will just be an unrealized development. We need to learn how to turn our data literacy and outcome focus into a decision.

As a professor or student, now is the time to take advantage of the time you have at home to work on these skill sets.  The Academic Program can help by providing software and product training as well as data literacy training and additional data literacy resources.  

All professors and students attending higher education universities are encouraged to apply to the program by visiting qlik.com/academicprogram.