How to build a culture of data literacy in government

Data literacy and culture change are two things that are really hard to achieve on a broad scale in government. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth working on. Governments rely on data to do everything, and ensuring that all public servants feel comfortable around data is vital.

That’s why we recently hosted an event on How to master data literacy in the public service. It covered the importance of understanding the role of data in policy formulation and evaluation, and how to get started with building your data literacy skills. We’ve condensed the Q&A part of the event into a short article you can share to inspire your department to invest in data literacy.

Why should everyone care about data literacy?

Essentially everything that government does rests on a foundation of data! Think about policy work, communications, public engagement, disaster preparedness, whatever it might be, it is difficult to imagine anything that government and the public sector does that doesn't require data to feed into it.

Everybody who is part of the public service has a role to play in terms of either the collection, the cleaning, the analysis, or the presentation of data at some part in their working in their journey. It is essential that everyone has an understanding of a foundational data language, but this doesn't mean that everybody becomes a coder or programmer. However, it does mean that to be able to really be efficient and effective in the work you need to be able to work with data and not just leave this to the people with data in their title.

In the digital world that we're in today, data has become the raw material that drives our modern digital organisations.

What is the biggest challenge in increasing or even introducing data literacy into the public service?

The notion of having a chief data officer in an organisation is a relatively new phenomenon, it is only in the last four or five years that there's been an executive champion put in place in most departments for that. Which is all really positive. The challenge that governments are facing is accepting the premise that data is central to everybody's job in the public service, and therefore how to upskill everyone. Once that argument is accepted then training can start to improve technology literacy so public servants are able to use some of the common tools to be able to look at data.

Assuming there's a will and the mandate to increase data literacy, what would you recommend as a first step for a public servant to increase or improve their literacy?

Firstly, let go of your fear. Next, reach out to your data representatives within your department, if you have a Chief Data Officer then reach out to them and see what learning resources they have for you. Data is a team sport, reach out to people you see using data in your network and ask them how they developed their skills. Take ownership of your own data literacy and don't wait for the organisation.

Top tip: You need to be critical. When looking at data you have to think about the quality of the data, the sources of it and maybe the innate bias that are in that data to make sure that you are using it to its fullest potential and not contributing to increasing that bias or making changes.

How do you actually identify the right data?

When trying to identify the right data, it’s helpful to work with a multidisciplinary team. They can help you to think about what the right data is, the right sources, where to look in a data catalogue and think about how you can utilise the tools that you have available to you. With the vast volume of data available to governments now it’s best to think about exactly what you want, rather than looking at data just because it's there.

How do you build a culture of data literacy in organisations?

There is no quick fix for culture change. You need to be promoting the importance of data literacy regularly, you could do this by getting some more data licenses so that people have their own space to learn on their own. They can go at their own pace and have the time to experiment.

Additionally, if the desire is to have an evidence-based and data-driven culture in organisations, it is worth thinking about how to incentivise honesty and transparency.

How do we bring data into our decision-making?

It is important to try to normalise data into the regular rhythm of evaluation and decision-making. A common trap to fall into is people build their data up and then every six months or once a year they will create a big briefing and then there's so much pressure to be able to tell a good story or be able to show that you have achieved your goals across all the metrics. Versus, if we move to an integrated data culture where people are sharing data with decision-makers on a regular basis, there is less pressure for the data to fluctuate.

Decision-makers are getting briefed with a traditional briefing note that might contain a couple of static graphs. In order to make the best decisions we should be providing real-time information that decision-makers can tap into to be able to essentially get a pulse on what is happening in government to be able to model in real-time what the impacts of policy decisions might be.

How do we ensure that we don't end up aggregating data to the extent that we erase the experiences, and the presence of minority groups?

Be intentional about thinking about potential blind spots. This is also where it becomes really important to have a diverse, multi-disciplinary team working on data. The more diverse views that are expressed, and the variety of experiences within a team, will illuminate the blind spots that you want to be able to address and fill as you're looking at kind of the data that you're working with.

TLDR: Multidisciplinary team, keep an open mind, always ask questions and challenge yourself.

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