Data Culture

What is a Data Culture?

Organizations with a data culture create an environment where data utilization is valued as a key to better decisions and business outcomes. It requires an organizational culture that champions attitudes, behaviors, and processes where data is accessible, trusted, and put to work readily to solve problems, find opportunities, and innovate. Furthermore, it values data-driven evidence and reason over seniority and hierarchies.

A data culture benefits an organization by exposing workers across teams and departments to the value of data. Those with a data culture work to remove barriers between data and those who need it to support and inform decision-making. However, it requires educating workers on data’s value, helping them find and understand data, and enabling them to trust it as they use it in various applications.

Benefits of a Data Culture

Data cultures push teams to focus on data to pursue goals and outcomes. Appropriate and relevant data insights help people better understand scenarios or situations. As proof, Forrester found that organizations with an advanced data culture are 2.8 times more likely to have double-digit growth than those with immature data cultures.

Promoting and supporting a data culture leads to valuable benefits such as:

• Better decision-making supported by more information, less bias, and a better understanding of patterns, trends, and other influencing factors.

• Improved efficiency by removing hurdles between data and those who need it, which saves time, reduces errors, and allows people to focus on more valuable tasks.

• Increased collaboration across functions as teams access the same data, can work together to solve problems, and reach alignment based on transparent, consistent data inputs.

• Improved data literacy by empowering workers with the skills and tools to discover, understand, and use data. Research from KPMG found that a 1% increase in data literacy boosted net income by 1.6%.

• Tighter data security through more open and auditable data processes, improved data governance and access controls, and increased confidence in how to use data appropriately.

• Increased innovation from access to data that spurs insights, highlights opportunities, and enables teams to explore ideas based on data-driven insights.

• Enhanced customer experience through a deeper understanding of customers’ behaviors and preferences to generate more accurate predictive analytics and present more relevant and personalized suggestions and offers.

• Reduced bias in decisions for more ethical outcomes based on data instead of opinions and incomplete analysis.

These and other benefits of a data culture make it popular among leading organizations across all industries.

Data Culture Core Components

Creating a data culture requires focusing on four key areas that enable teams to find, govern, understand, and use data. These four pillars are defined as follows:

1. Data Search & Discovery - enabling users to find, understand, and trust the information they need, helped by a notion of stewardship where individuals and subject-matter experts maintain the integrity and usefulness of data assets.

2. Data Literacy - equipping workers with the skills and tools required to understand, analyze, and collaborate with data, ultimately to make data-driven decisions.

3. Data Governance - establishing a structured data governance framework supported by clear policies which are used to maintain the quality and security of data across the enterprise.

4. Data Leadership - aligning data initiatives to outcomes and measuring the organization's value while transforming operations, management, and mindset to leverage data and AI.

What is a Data Culture Maturity Model?

Organizations must continuously strive to advance a data culture by improving a data culture’s four core components. Progress can be measured, benchmarked, and planned using a data culture maturity model, which provides a framework and qualitative evaluation for assessing data culture strengths and weaknesses. 

Leaders can use a data culture maturity model to determine where to prioritize efforts to advance an organization’s data usage. Areas where a maturity model evaluates a data culture are how data self-service is enabled, policies are documented, training programs are deployed, and leaders engage data culture initiatives across the organization.

Alation has developed a Data Culture Maturity Model based on experiences working with numerous organizations, including 40% of the Fortune 100.

Best Practices for Building a Data Culture

Most organizations find it helpful to begin with a data culture maturity model assessment to determine current progress, identify critical gaps, and develop a plan for closing those gaps and increasing the value a data culture brings to the organization. By understanding the current maturity level of a data culture, organizations can then build a program for enabling and improving how workers use data.

Best practices for putting data culture maturity model assessment findings into action include: 

• Align the data culture strategy with clear business objectives that help prioritize data initiatives supporting those overarching goals.

• Identify data skills gaps that can be addressed through data literacy training and resources and by allowing workers to experiment with new tools and techniques.

• Deploy data intelligence tools such as a data catalog that combine search and discovery, governance, lineage, collaboration, analytics, and other capabilities to streamline and accelerate data culture maturity.

• Encourage cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing, and celebrate success as it happens.

• Put guardrails in place to enforce access, security, usage, and other policies and procedures without impeding access to data.

• Enable measurements and reporting on data culture progress and impact and regularly assess and adjust data culture plans accordingly.

Alation Empowers Data Cultures 

Alation created the Data Culture Maturity Assessment to help organizations gauge data culture maturity levels across data search and discovery, data governance, data literacy, and data leadership. It’s the best starting point for launching, improving, and expanding a data culture.

Alation supports a data culture with intelligent search capabilities that democratize discovery, self-service analytics to encourage decision-making using trusted data, data governance to safely put data to work without compromising security and compliance, and analytics to continuously advance an organization’s data maturity.

A key component of this effort is Alation Analytics Cloud, a unified reporting platform that enables organizations to measure and improve their data culture maturity. By providing visibility into data usage patterns, tracking adoption, and assessing the impact of data initiatives, Alation Analytics Cloud helps data leaders make informed decisions about their data programs. With insights into query activity, curated assets, and platform engagement, organizations can optimize their data strategies, align data investments with business outcomes, and continuously refine their approach to data culture development.

Next Steps: Learn More About Data Culture

Discover why so many organizations are building, nurturing, and improving data cultures with the following resources: