Your persona
Your responses indicate you're already a data leader. You use data every day to make decisions, and you're always looking for new ways to use it to improve your work.
But there's always more to do. You can help others learn about data, or you can use your skills to drive innovation, and as someone in a position of leadership or management, you could be well-placed to drive a data-driven culture or support others in developing their own competencies.
Build your skills and knowledge
Identify a skill area to develop which will be most relevant and useful. Do you do the analysis yourself, or are you the person who needs to tell compelling stories with data? Will you be the person putting together slides with data visualisations, or is that something a team member does for you? Focussing on your role can help you be strategic in pinpointing what to explore further.
Do you have a data ethics framework? If so, familiarise yourself with it and consider how to promote best practices to your team. If not, perhaps you could collaborate with others to develop one.
Develop a well-defined incident response plan that outlines how your team will handle data breaches and security incidents. As part of this, you could establish a comprehensive data governance framework that defines roles, responsibilities, and accountability for data protection.
Carve out time for professional development. Diarise a chunk of time each week where you can take an Apolitical course, explore community articles, or anything else that aligns with your motivations.
Consider the people you serve. Are you confident you’d be able to explain to the public how your team or department works with data?
Create a community of practice
Provide your team with the resources they need to use data effectively: training, tools, and access to data.
Connect with peers. What are your colleagues doing with data? Are there opportunities for peer learning or cross-functional collaboration? Share this assessment with peers. Create a community of practice where you can discuss your outcomes and strategise which priorities might align with ongoing initiatives and objectives.
Identify a colleague who is in the early stages of developing their data competencies - perhaps you could support or mentor them.
The Apolitical community is full of discussion around best practices in using data. Community members regularly post questions and ask for advice in this area. You could read and respond to any queries you feel well-placed to answer. Or, you could use this as a way to post your own discussion question and connect with other data users similar to you. Here's a link to Q&A to get you started: What tools do you use for creating data visualisations?
Finally, lead by example. Celebrate successes and learn from failures. When your team uses data to make a good decision, be sure to recognise their efforts. And when they make a mistake, use it as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Keep exploring
Apolitical community members have submitted many thought-provoking articles, and in an area such as data, there’s new content coming up all the time. Keep your finger on the pulse by regularly reviewing what's out there, and consider engaging with the article creator by using the comment function. Here's a link to the article area to get you started: What is the new potential of data-driven decision-making in the public sector?
Or catch up one of our event recordings: How to use data effectively in the public service.
If you’re looking for inspiration for structured skill development, take a look at our Learning Plans where we have stitched together disparate educational resources into rich, diverse, cohesive and enlightening learning journeys.
What's next?
Not sure if this is the right persona for you? This diagnostic and its suggested outcome have been designed for illustrative purposes and may not reflect your level of awareness or competency.
Find a guide to the statements covered plus the scenario questions here: Data Self-Assessment and Scenario Summaries.
Explore the other personae using the links below:
Leadership: Data Explorer, Data Consolidator, or Data Trailblazer
Non-leadership:Data Explorer, Data Consolidator, or Data Trailblazer
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