Why organizations need data literacy in today's industrial revolution?

The modern world has already approached the digital revolution and industries are on the verge of this revolution. The arrival of the new industrial cycle, or fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), is now enabling businesses across diverse industry verticals to turn to technology to stay competitive in this quick-shifting world. The winners of the new industrial endeavor will certainly be those with data skills. Already, it is predicted that there will be a ten-fold increase in worldwide data by 2025. In this way, having data skills to understand this data surge will be profitable for both organizations and individuals alike.

Significantly, with the growing data landscape, data-driven enterprises will produce data literate employees that can contribute to their roles and assist businesses to hone their competitive edge in a hostile global economy.

As Industry 4.0 is reaching every aspect of businesses and life, the future workplaces increasingly rely on automation powered by artificial intelligence, the crowdsourcing of tasks, and the use of a smart workforce. The new industrial revolution is rapidly transforming workplaces into workspaces, forming local nodes of a complex network of people, technologies and practices that will establish a potentially globally distributed workspace.

Winning the Wave

Unlike the previous industrial revolutions which used water and steam power to drive industry, the fourth industrial revolution signifies the impact on industry of ubiquitous computing, sensor technology and high-speed communications. It involves not only the exponential growth in computing power per unit cost but also the ability to gather large amounts of data. That needs to be processed in ways that can have both technically or economically impact on businesses.

However, the skills required to process, assess, interpret, and act upon the data is growing at a steady rate against the rapid workforce transition. This skillset, which is typically referred to as data literacy, will empower individuals as well as businesses to leverage data-driven insights to make better decisions.

While data is becoming more influential than ever, the big problem is that most of us are not good at understanding and making sense of the data. This is where the workforce needs to enhance and improve their data literacy. Reports show that those countries, regions and companies that best at producing such skills will be leading the way in the digital economy. In addition, companies that have higher data literacy have been witnessed an increase of 3 percent to 5 percent enterprise value.

In a survey commissioned by Qlik and conducted by Wharton University, the Data Literacy Index identified a surge in enterprise value of between US$320-US$534 million for the average organization that contributed to the research. While most of the global employees are not fully confident in their ability to read, work with, analyze, and argue with data, the report identified three core pillars of data literacy – Data Literacy Skills, Data-Driven Decision Making, and Data Dispersion.

Moreover, in order to survive the fourth industrial revolution, it is essential to understand the nature of the literate practice of modern work. Today's workplaces must deliberate literacy texts and practices that reinforce the skills, knowledge and attributes required to empower the workforce that drives businesses in the modern data revolution.