Power BI Reporting: Do You Speak Data?

Data is a gold mine that’s hard to escape. It is estimated that the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, and people will produce 463 exabytes of data every day globally by the end of 2025 — a ten-fold increase from 2016. The surge in generated data makes it all the more critical for businesses to use data to remain competitive.

Data targeting is one of the best uses of the lots of data that a company generates. It involves using data to improve marketing campaigns and enhance decision-making. Your entire business strategy can be data-driven, not just your marketing campaigns. Every business process can depend on nothing but data.

Yet, while companies continue to collect, analyze, and store data, its real value remains untapped. According to a Forrester study, 60% to 73% of all enterprise data is unanalyzed.

What’s Holding Back Businesses From Becoming Fully Data-Driven?

Every business has a massive data opportunity. Not only does it support better business outcomes, but when empowered with adequate training and necessary tools, research respondents recognized its ability to enable them to become more efficient managers, make better decisions, gain leadership trust, and more.

However, data strategies often fail to recognize businesses’ critical role in helping employees become confident using data. Many companies have simply put data in workers’ hands and expect them to perform magic with it. This can affect some people’s understanding of the potential of data to support their operations, comfort with it, and in turn, desire to use it.

Lack of Data Literacy

Literacy usually means the ability to read and write. However, data literacy refers to knowledge or competency in a specific area. Data literate individuals have a skill set, including reading, communicating, producing, and manipulating data for meaningful use. These are skills that 82% of companies expect their workers to possess. Yet, few educational systems dedicate time to teaching data skills as such less than 30% of U.S. employees feel data literate.

While employers expect data-literate workers, 68% of business executives have challenges creating measurable value from data. Almost 75% said their data analytic projects fail to generate practical insights.

The lack of data literacy has a significant impact on productivity. Companies lose an estimated 43 hours of work per worker per year due to data-induced absenteeism and procrastination.

Even more worrying is how few workers depend on data when making business decisions. Almost half of the workers trust their instincts over data when deciding. More than 65% of senior management and C-suite executives go with their instincts over data-driven insights. Such low data literacy skills are affecting business growth. For instance, 36% of workers avoid using data and find an alternative approach to complete a task. Plus, almost 15% of employees would avoid doing the data-driven project completely.

Data Appreciation Isn’t Corresponding to Employee Adoption

Nearly all workers recognize data as an asset in the workplace, but few use it to inform better decision-making.

Only 37% of workers trust their decisions when those decisions deal with data, and 48% (almost half) often defer to making decisions based on instincts and gut feeling over data-driven insights. This is true for individuals at every career stage and is especially prevalent at senior levels. For example, around two-thirds of directors, senior managers, and C-suite executives would rely on their gut and experience over data-driven insight compared with just 41% of junior managers and employees below the last management layer.

Although experience and trusting gut instincts are crucial for business, research shows that executives’ confidence in working with insights impedes some companies’ ability to lead with data.

Lack of Data Skills Is Limiting Productivity

The increased availability and adoption of data come with various challenges. Nearly 74% (three-quarters) of employees report feeling unhappy or overwhelmed when using data. This negatively impacts their performance: More than 36% (one-third) of overwhelmed workers globally report dedicating at least one hour per week to procrastinating over data-related projects.

These feelings result in some workers avoiding data. They would prefer to find an alternative approach to complete the project without using data, while 14% would avoid it entirely. This is a real barrier to organizations trying to build a data-driven culture.

Data Skills Are Increasingly Crucial, Yet Training Lags

Data and analytics are mission-crucial to thriving in dramatically changing circumstances, Power BI Reporting identifying opportunities, informing decisions, and navigating change. As companies embrace a digital-first age, data literacy becomes increasingly critical.

“Data offers a key competitive advantage. Business success depends on training and enabling everyone across an organization to use data to make better decisions,” said Mark Nelson, President & CEO of Tableau.

Today, 82% of decision-makers expect basic data literacy from workers in every department, including HR, IT, product, and operations. And these expectations are only rising. By 2025, nearly 70% of employees are expected to use data heavily in their tasks, up from 40% in 2018.

“To unlock the power of data, businesses must invest in their most essential resource — their people — by providing opportunities for data training and development beyond traditional data-focused roles.”

While employees and business leaders agree that data skills are increasingly crucial to understand and act on the massive amounts of data their companies produce, that awareness isn’t translated to investments in data skills. Nearly three-quarters of leaders and decision-makers believe workers should enhance their data skills through on-the-job, ad-hoc knowledge, usually from colleagues or trial-and-error. Only 39% of companies make data training available to all workers, with the onus to train individuals usually falling to the team or department heads.

Assess Data Literacy at Your Company

Data and analytics leaders should create the narrative for data literacy and highlight the value gained in business.

Assess data literacy at your workplace  with these questions:

How many individuals in your organization can interpret easy statistical operations such as correlations?

How many business managers can construct a case based on accurate, concrete, and relevant numbers?

How many business managers can explain their systems or processes’ output?

How many data scientists in your organization can explain their machine learning algorithms’ output?

How many of your customers can internalize and appreciate the essence of the shared data?

Becoming Data-Driven With PBRS

Data has permeated professional industries from tech and business to health and agriculture and for a good reason. When used effectively, data can help organizations better target customers, foster more strategic decision-making and identify relationships between customers and their needs. Data lets businesses know their customers to improve their marketing strategies and enhance customer experience.

Deploying a well-strategized training plan that involves all individuals can help businesses realize the full potential that data-based processes promise. It will develop a culture that finds value in data and empowers workers to act on data-driven insights rather than their gut.

Power BI Reports Scheduler (PBRS) complements a data literacy program by providing software to automate the scheduling and distribution of dashboards and reports. PBRS allows organizations to schedule their data distribution to ensure the timely delivery of crucial information. If you aren’t sure how to get started, download a 30-day trial to see how PBRS can help create a data-driven culture.