Laura Sebastian on creating a Data Culture by building Data Literacy and improving Data Quality Data Perspectives

Episode summary:

In this episode, Nupur Gandhi is joined by Dr. Laura Sebastian Coleman who discusses the importance of data awareness and how to build the data quality strategy ground up. She explains how data literacy can be learnt and can in fact help reduce data quality problems. 

She provides insights on her experiences editing the DMBOK and highlights, how honing her people skills, was a bigger challenge than bridging the disparate parts of DMBOK together, as an editor. She shares how her curiosity and voracious reading has helped her be a successful data practitioner in spite of data being her 3rd career. 

She encourages everyone to not hesitate to ask questions, dabble with data and collaborate with stakeholders across the organization to get the utmost understanding of the impact of the data.

Key Takeaways:

· Embrace a data culture through increased awareness, improved data literacy

· Increasing data awareness within the organization will aid towards solving data quality problems and is a cost effective way to solve data quality problems along with building data literacy in the organization

· Data literacy is a flavor of general literacy and is an ability to understand, use and communicate about data and also to apply knowledge, skills and expertise of data to new situations

· Quick checklist to enable data quality improvement: What do you mean by high quality data, How do you detect low data quality issue, what do you do once you detect the low data quality issue

· A cost effective DQ improvement principle that most organizations can use is to ensure everyone is aware of their internal data consumers and understand  how those internal data consumers use your data

· Data literacy can most certainly be learned and practiced, no matter where you are in your data journey

· People skills will always remain the biggest challenge, no matter the initiative

· Use frameworks to guide you but don’t expect them to solve the problem as frameworks are a part of the solution, not the solution

· Being curious about data and asking the right questions along with partnering with data stakeholders like data modelers, data architects in your company can be a good starting point to build data literacy

Episode Notes:

Recommend reading the 3 data management books, authored by Dr. Laura Sebastian Coleman, all available on Amazon

· Data Quality Management (Published in 2014) 

· Navigating the Labyrinth| Executive guide to DMBOK (Published in 2017) 

· Measuring data quality for ongoing improvement (Published in Feb 2022) 

More about the guest, Dr Laura Sebastian- Coleman:

Laura is a Director of Data Quality management in Prudential, author of multiple data management books, recipient of DAMA Award for Excellence in Data Management.