Seek To Influence
Building up a strong data culture is an important part of sustaining change management and this can be done through organisation-wide campaigns to raise the overall understanding of the importance of data and value. If anything, it gets everyone in the organisation more involved in the journey, rather than this being the work of a smaller transformation team.
It was once said by Henry Ford that “Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” The quote aptly describes our approach in ensuring successful data culture and transformation. “Coming together is the beginning” reminds that the importance of ensuring that each member is aligned with the common purpose and feels a sense of belonging in the overall transformation goals. The next phase “Keeping together is progress”, reminds us that to sustain the momentum when building up the data culture. This will finally ignite the last phase “Working together is success” which invokes shared contributions and allow us to work together to achieve successful data transformation. In this tactic, we will share with you how we rally everyone in the organization and strive to build up a strong data culture to enable transformation.
Start From The Top
It is important to have strong leadership support as you try to address cultural and data literacy challenges to spearhead data transformation. Through regular communication and engagement, you can inculcate the idea that data transformation is everyone’s responsibility and does not reside only in the hands of a few individuals such as the data scientist or the IT folks. Having top leadership buy-in puts you in a better position to execute your organisation’s data strategy and gets you one step closer to delivering projects with measurable business outcomes.
Data Campaigns To Sustain Momentum
Nobody likes authority breathing down on them asking them to do this, or that. Likewise, to build a strong data culture, it can sometimes be counter-productive to bluntly mandate and incessantly hound the staff to take up courses and adopt good data practices. While it is important to communicate and remind the staff on what they need to do, it helps to do so in a fun way. Consider planning a series of data campaigns throughout the year that reminds everyone what you’re aiming for, the progress that has been made so far as an organisation, as well as simple, fun and rewarding tasks that they can immediately do. This helps to ensure that the importance and progress of your data transformation journey remains at the top of the minds of everyone within the organization.
There are a wide range of campaigns that you can leverage on to sustain the momentum and this can vary from sharing sessions about the organisation’s data strategy and latest efforts, to data-related challenges and training. The possibilities are endless and up to your team’s capacity and imagination. The whole idea is to excite staff about embarking on the transformation journey together and seeing themselves as an important part of change, rather than being a bystander. With sustained and frequent campaigns, you can encourage a culture that embraces data transformation.
Here are some areas you can consider when organizing such campaigns:
1. Upskilling Campaigns
People are quite bogged down with work, and sometimes going for training is the last thing on their mind. Rather than just point them to courses that they are expected to take, consider organising dedicated runs of the courses where they can sign up as a group. If there are eLearning courses or online resources that you need them to study, consider running it as a campaign where there are giveaways for participants that hit the desired milestone. Better still, give them some extra bonus when they sign up as a group and hit the milestone together. It fosters a stronger sense of unity and they can encourage one another along in the journey.
2. Meet-up for data enthusiasts and practitioners
When working with data, it is not uncommon to have multiple roadblocks every step of your way. It can be about understanding data policies, figuring out where the data sources are, or about what software and tools to use. The last thing you want is to have every staff try to resolve these problems on their own. Once you have begun to build up a group of data enthusiasts and practitioners, you should have them network and share their learnings with one another. This way, you will be able to build up a culture of sharing and exchange and intangible benefits such as cross-pollination of ideas and sharing of lessons learnt.
3. Consultation sessions for data-related problems
Imagine a situation where you encounter issues with your data project and do not having anyone to turn to. The spark in you may just fizzle out if you have been making little headway for a long time. As such, it is useful to offer an avenue for consultations as you focus on training up data enthusiasts and champions to encourage them to go beyond their learnings embark on work-related data projects. In this aspect, the central data transformation team can consider offering clinic sessions that happen on a regular basis to help this group of staff with the issues that they encounter.
4. Competition and challenges
Internal competition and challenges can help to drum up interest in data analytics and celebrate the successes of teams that have put in the effort to hone their skills. To encourage greater relevance to work, one can also encourage staff to use their work-related data and problem statements as a use-case for the organisation-wide competitions.
5. Open call for data problems and projects to work on
An important catalyst for organisation-wide data transformation is to be able to share and leverage on datasets across domains and crucial to that is to inculcate the idea of sharing data or leveraging on other domains to complement your own data. You will often have pockets of staff who are enthusiastic about using data to solve problems. You will also have divisions with data but not the expertise to exploit them. As such, having open calls for staff to put up their work-related problem statements and datasets is one avenue to encourage sharing and cross-pollination of ideas. The central data transformation team plays an important role here by being the middleman to broker partnerships when use cases have a similar solution or when other datasets can enrich the problem.
6. Recruitment drives for data champions
To ensure sustained growth of the pool of data champions, annual recruitment drives and campaigns as a call to action will help to raise awareness. Make being a data champion a prestigious affair, and the status a celebrated one organisation-wide. This can be done through strong management support and recognition or even perks to bolster the champions when it comes to their yearly appraisals.
Analytics By Design Methodology At The Heart Of A Strong Data Culture
Apart from building up a data culture, the Data Science and AI Division within GovTech has been advocating and piloting a new methodology called Analytics by Design. The objective is to minimise the analytics debt that we unknowingly incur when we deprioritize planning how we are going to use our data even before we start collecting or generating them. Oftentimes, when we try to derive insights at the end of a product roll-out, policy or programme, we realise that the data we have is not really suitable for the analytics work at hand.
The Analytics by Design methodology can be summarised into these 2 parts:
Philosophy - Plan how your data will be used to improve your project, even before the project starts to collect or generate them.
Framework - executed via a Question-Action-Data-Simulate (QuADS) framework. Achieve a strong synergy between the actions we take (Action), the questions we ask (Question), and the data we collect (Data). The synergy is verified by running an analysis on mock data before the project begins (Simulate).
As more projects seek to adopt more data-driven decision making, teams will begin to uncover more gaps and realise that their data is not fit-for-purpose. Embracing the Analytics By Design methodology will help to fuel change as we put analytics right at the heart of the projects we do, and not an afterthought.
More details about the ABD methodology can be found here at https://go.gov.sg/analytics-by-design.
