Adobe targets data literacy with curriculum and analytics platform access

Adobe today launched a global program through which it will provide college instructors and students with both free access to the Adobe Analytics platform and a curriculum created in partnership with major universities.

As part of that effort, Adobe has created an Adobe Analytics curriculum for education in collaboration with professors from institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Utah, and the University of Michigan.

The modules included in the curriculum address data collection issues such as warehousing and cleansing; data strategy and architecture; standard metrics and functionality, and analysis workplace fundamentals that teach students how best to curate data using a set of visualization tools created by Adobe. The program is an extension of an existing Adobe Creative Campus program, which advances digital literacy via access to the Adobe Creative Cloud platform within a classroom setting.

The goal is to increase the data analytics literacy of college graduates by making it easy for them to access analytics accessed via a cloud service, said Nate Smith, group manager for Adobe Analytics. Adobe, meanwhile, benefits because the potential pool of end users that might employ its analytics software once students graduate naturally increases, he added.

As organizations seek to rely more on decisions that are driven by data it’s become apparent that the analytics literacy among employees needs to improve. Training employees to employ analytic applications that make it easier to visualize trends and anomalies has become a higher priority. However, many organizations have employees that remain perfectly content to continue to rely on two-dimensional spreadsheet applications. The challenge is encouraging those employees to become deeper versed in analytics.

Many organizations are naturally looking to recruit college graduates that well-versed in analytics fundamentals to fill that skills gap. It’s not uncommon for many of those recruits to bring a fresh set of eyes that surfaces insights that other employees fail to see simply because they have been working with a set of data for an overly extended amount of time, noted Smith.

Adobe, of course, isn’t the only provider of analytics applications that has determined colleges and universities are fertile ground for attracting additional users to their platform. As providers of analytic applications vie for the affinity of the next generation of their applications the level of analytics acumen among college graduates should only steadily increase.

In the meantime, Smooth said organizations would be well-advised to remember insights have a shelf live as data is continuously updated, said Smith. As more organizations embrace analytics applications in many cases it becomes apparent they need to modernize business processes based to make the insight surfaced truly actionable, he added.

There’s clearly a lot of focus on digital business transformation in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge organizations face is most of them don’t have a lot of insight into how customer behaviors are changing and evolving. There’s a lot of guesswork when it comes to crafting a digital customer experience that requires a significant amount of experimentation. Analytics will obviously play a crucial role in enabling organizations to visualize the impact a change to a business process is having on the customer experience.

Of course, if there’s no one within the organization that understands how to collect, organize, and analyze that data no amount of software in the world will make much of a difference. No one knows this better than the providers of analytics applications. As such, organizations of all sizes might want to ask those vendors what lengths they are willing to go to increase the potential user base of their software.