Nearly every city, county or state gathers huge quantities of data for a variety of purposes. Some of it is effectively used, some is entirely ignored, and some of it is denied. But one thing is clear: Data has become the language of government.
With that in mind, it’s increasingly critical that government employees are bilingual; not only must they be traditionally literate in that they can speak clearly and understand what others have said, they also need to be steeped in something that’s become widely known as data literacy.
This is not intended just for people who would identify themselves as data specialists, whose jobs are primarily to help create or analyze data. Data literacy efforts must spread throughout any well-run government organization.
The need for government leaders to understand data – and for data specialists to translate it into clear comprehensible English – has become especially critical for those who are using it to make important decisions or monitor the programs in which they’re involved in order to take steps to improve them.
But, in the real world there’s no requirement that elected officials really understand the charts, graphs and spreadsheets that are put before them. When was the last time you heard someone running for city council or selectman boasting that “I’ll be able to do my job well because I’m data literate”?
What’s more, it’s critical for staff at many levels to understand the data and its significance, even if they’re not using it to make decisions. That’s because many employees collect and input data. Multiple cities have found that data quality improves when their workforce understands the use to which the data is put, its importance to the taxpayers they serve, and its connection to the success of their departments.
This idea was well spelled out in a 2022 Deloitte report, “Data Literacy for the Public Sector: Lessons from Early Pioneers in the U.S.” One of its most important findings was that, “In order for agencies to effectively engage in the ever-changing data landscape, organizational data literacy capacity and program models can help ensure individuals across the workforce can read, write, and communicate with data in the context of their role. Data and analytics are no longer ‘just’ for specialists, such as data engineers and data scientists; rather, data literacy is now increasingly recognized as a core workforce competency.”
The ways that cities are achieving better staff data literacy come not only
from live or online classes and, study-at-your-own pace materials, but also
from established communities of interest that encourage employees to meet
and learn from each other.
Still, not all employees are going to be willing students, as the time they spend
achieving data literacy can add onto an already overwhelming work week. We’ve never heard of a place that offered overtime hours for employees who were taking an online course in data literacy.
Early efforts to foster data literacy in the public sector workforce began nearly a decade ago, when President Barack Obama signed an executive order that boosted the development of open data 3 – the notion that, absent an overriding reason, all government data be accessible to all Americans.
That idea quickly gained traction with the nation’s cities, and they began to make their data more accessible to a broader range of people both inside and outside of government. But simply providing data to people is only half the battle. It’s equally important that they are helped to have the capacity to evaluate it, understand it and ask the appropriate questions about its meaning.
Not only is it important for people in the public sector to be able to understand data, it’s also important that they use the words of data to mean the same thing as other people think they mean.
In the first book of the Old Testament, the story is told of the Tower of Babel. At heart, the tale concerns the effort of Babylonians to create a tower that would “reach to the heavens.” But that lofty goal proved to be a failure because the people building the tower spoke many different languages.
This ancient story has a lesson for cities now that data has become the language of government. It’s critical for them to speak the same language – to be data literate – or else their programs and policies can risk facing the fate of the Tower of Babel.
One challenge that confronts people who are pushing data literacy programs in their cities, counties and states is the lack of resources for adequate training. Like all other government efforts, promoting data literacy isn’t free. As a result, it’s important for elected and appointed leaders to have sufficient buy-in to this process for them to make the necessary resources available.
This is particularly worrisome, as many states and localities are confronting a “fiscal cliff,” and when expenses outpace revenues, the first thing to be dropped are often training programs.
But despite this tendency, governments that cut back on this kind of education are shortsighted, and their reliance on data is ultimately doomed to be less than successful.
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