BARC DATA CULTURE SURVEY 23

“Data culture eats data strategy for breakfast” has become a popular saying among data and analytics managers and executives. Even the best data strategy cannot fulfill its potential if the data culture in the company does not match it. Ultimately, it is the people in the company who have to change their behavior and mindset in order to benefit from the ever increasing amount of data available to them.

In last year’s BARC Data Culture Survey, participants named ‘data access’ as the most frequently implemented of the six elements in BARC’s Data Culture Framework. For this reason, this year we focused on questions about the implementation of data access. The results provide interesting insights into prevailing views on the ‘right to know’ and ‘need to know’ principles of data access, the technologies used and the importance of data knowledge (i.e., the information available on data and the skills required to use it).

In this year’s survey, ‘data access’ is now considered the most relevant initiative to positively influence data culture while ‘data strategy’ took first place from ‘data access’ as the most commonly implemented initiative. This confirms that the opening statement has reached the top of organizations and that the consideration and development of a data culture should be anchored in the data strategy.