Synopsis: How to build a corporate culture of communication with data.

Difficulty: Beginner, at least from a technical point of view.

“Data Fluency” isn’t about how to use Hadoop, or Spark, or any other tool. It isn’t about how to code using R. It isn’t even about being a Data Scientist per se. Rather, this is a book about building an organizational culture that understands how to communicate using data, which isn’t as simple as it sounds.

You may have noticed the unusual way I phrased the “Difficulty” field above. Changing culture in an organization is never easy, and few managers are adept at it. Zach and Chris Gemignani give the reader a roadmap to navigate such a change, and to me their ideas seem solid.

The Gemignani’s have built a frame work for data fluency that addresses both individual and coporate needs as consumers and producers. I won’t steal their thunder by showing the picture here, but it makes all the sense in the world when you think about data production and consumption in an organization.

I’m glad someone finally wrote this book. The tendency thus far has been to address the skills of the data scientist, but when you think about it, having just one person (or even a small handful) with the skills to communicate with data will not do much to make that organization data-driven. For that to happen stakeholders at all levels must be fluent with data, and that’s exactly the problem this book aims to solve.