As part of our New Year’s resolutions, we all have habits we wish we could eliminate, just as there are others we’d like to establish.

It might be swapping a tendency for procrastination for productivity after lunch, exchanging nightly ‘doom scrolling’ for a book before bed, or going to the gym rather than watching the motivational clips that tell you to do so.

Whatever it is, we know at the back of our minds there is often a better or aspirational way of doing things. But there is a reason so many resolutions fail: we often aren’t aware just how ingrained the unwanted habits are, which makes it harder to learn new ones. Replacing them requires a conscious commitment to change.

Developing professional skills is just the same. Whether acquiring a specific certification or developing less tangible (but no less important) attributes, we need to deliberately learn and make clear plans for acquiring new skills – it’s important to be proactive, not passive.

In the world of tech and data, this mantra is even more fundamental. If society and business are evolving quickly, it’s because innovation is driving it, meaning digital skills can become obsolete almost as soon as they have been learned.

Continuous learning is something of a prerequisite for most job roles, but is even more essential when technology is involved.

The art of ‘learning your craft’ and applying it well still holds some sway, but adaptability is the name of the game when it comes to data skills.

It’s time to learn how to unlearn

However, if we revisit the notion of committing to change, note that change is a two-way street. Developing professional skills, particularly in a fast-moving world such as data, doesn’t necessarily mean adding new skills indefinitely to build the biggest portfolio possible. It’s just as important to unlearn redundant ones.

It might seem counterintuitive to deliberately remove skills, but no one has infinite capacity to develop new ones while maintaining high standards of performance elsewhere. What’s more, the new can sometimes conflict with, if not outright contradict, the old.

In times of stress, particularly if new skills haven’t fully become habits, it’s easy to fall back on previous, outdated but familiar, ways of working.

Unlearning is core to data literacy

In a professional context, data literacy is one of the most important areas to learn and unlearn skills quickly. Again, this might seem counterintuitive.

After all, data is primarily made up of facts and numbers – while we certainly need to learn how to use new tools to better access and derive insights from data, surely once we have achieved a level of data literacy, we are equipped to understand and use data effectively.

Unfortunately, even for seasoned data practitioners, it’s more complicated than that. New data sources are being created and integrated into businesses all the time, with their own patterns and behaviors that require learning.

Existing data sources also evolve, showing new trends or losing importance altogether. Where does unlearning come in? If we assign the same status to new sources or ignore what they show us because they don’t conform with what we’ve come to expect, those observing it will miss new opportunities and threats.

Ultimately, data literacy is a constant process of learning and unlearning, of putting aside assumptions while still applying our experience and understanding to get to the heart of what data tells us. So how do you learn how to unlearn?

Three steps to unlearning

Broadly speaking, there are three steps to unlearning:

1. Know when it’s time to unlearn:

Be conscious of whenever something we’ve learnt no longer applies. Sometimes that’s easy – there might be a tangible rule change.

Typically, it’s more challenging than this, as many skills (like habits) become unconscious. In data literacy, that means having a process in place that can highlight when something isn’t working.

2. Learn independently:

If the need to change has been identified, we first need to acquire the new skill. But it needs to be done independently from the existing approach.

Acquiring a new skill is a fragile process and lacks the body of evidence that established capabilities have to prove value, so can’t overlap with current skills – just as outdated and updated ways of looking at data shouldn’t be used simultaneously. This is crucial to unlearning the previous skill.

3. Break the habit then make it again:

To truly master a skill, it needs to become second nature so it can be deployed unconsciously, even when under pressure. However, that’s not easy if experienced team members used to doing things a certain way are influencing those around them.

Less experienced colleagues might follow their lead as best practice, even if there is a more productive solution trying to be instilled by leadership. It could be beneficial to allow them time to make new habits without being impacted by experienced colleagues who might find change more difficult.

All organisations need their employees to have the skills to thrive in the future of work, and data literacy is a key foundation on which they should be built.

But even the capabilities at the cutting edge need to be replaced at some point. After all, it’s all very well becoming an expert in a particular field, but sometimes, the field itself changes.

So, if professional skill development is part of your New Year’s resolutions, consider what current experience needs to be acknowledged or forgotten, before you build new skills and challenge yourself accordingly to avoid falling back into old habits.

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Moving to the cloud certainly makes sense from an African business perspective, despite some serious challenges and risk factors unique to these shores. However, not all businesses can take the plunge.

Some businesses are reliant on expensive legacy systems that work well for them, while others are dissuaded from the move because of budgetary and compliance concerns.

Luckily, a revolution in how cloud computing is approached means businesses not quite ready to migrate to the cloud fully can extract the benefits of being in the cloud while still using their own on-prem systems, which effectively redoubles security efforts and removes legislative compliance headaches.

Before we get there, let’s take a look at the context in Africa generally and South Africa specifically.

Until the last few years there hasn’t been a great deal of infrastructure investment on these shores by the key cloud players. While we have seen this change recently with substantial Microsoft and Amazon Web Services investments, we are also seeing the uptake of other providers such as Snowflake and MogoDB Atlas, which offer more cost-effective cloud-based solutions.

There’s little denying that the time has arrived for Africa to be a global player and not just a consumer.

Challenges make this difficult, and closer to home any business can attest to the pain caused by our unreliable energy grid. During load shedding, and the sometimes-unplanned outages that follow the power cuts as a result of poor infrastructure, communications often grind to a halt and technology becomes unavailable.

An enterprise business which runs on-prem solutions needs to invest in hardware as well as a connectivity solution.

This entire setup runs on power and so now there is an extra investment needed: backup power in the form of generators, solar and batteries and UPS systems, which are all expensive.

Essentially, this means that if a business made an investment in a data centre two years ago, if you factor the need to replace hardware components which have taken a massive wear and tear beating due to persistent power surges as the power supply switches from the utility to another source, as well as the actual power backup system itself, it is fair to say this same business would have to quadruple that investment today to keep going.

If we consider that running an on-prem business requires huge amounts of capital, it should follow that cloud makes business sense. Yet still there is hesitancy and it is important to interrogate the reasons for this.

The cloud can become extremely expensive. By way of analogy, when you move house, you need to go through everything you have accumulated over time, sort through it, pack, change location and integrate it into your new space. This requires a great deal of time – something most businesses don’t have in abundance.

Very few organisations can afford to take time out to sort through, analyse and order its data before moving it to the cloud.

They must remain online, and they must be making real-time data-driven decisions to remain competitive, so they move massive volumes of data to the cloud, which is expensive and if it is unsorted and uncleaned, the exercise is akin to bleeding money.

Cloud technology itself has not yet evolved to a place where one provider can tick all the boxes and provide a full, one-stop shop for every business’s needs. This requires moving to multi-vendor solutions. One vendor may account for 70% of a business’s functionality while the rest is spread elsewhere and so there must be a concerted effort to seek compatibility.

Lastly, a business must understand its data to use its data. As mentioned, businesses have data in a number of different places and so the question must be asked – what is the point of bringing this data into the cloud if there is no use case for it? Businesses simply must be in control of their data.

Beyond these three major stumbling blocks for many businesses, and the risk that load shedding and unreliable energy supply adds to the equation, there are also legislative and trust issues, and a reliance on legacy systems. The second a business puts data into a public space it invokes POPIA. Being POPI compliant is a complex and expensive exercise which adds to business hesitancy to move to the cloud.

POPIA also places strict rules on cross-border movement of information and businesses know they must work with expert counsel to remain compliant.

However, compliance doesn’t end there. If one looks at the cloud infrastructure in South Africa, most use Europe-based data centres and so businesses need to be compliant with basic European law. This is not well-known in South Africa.

Some businesses, especially those in the manufacturing sector, have invested in massive legacy systems which may be outdated and heavy or clunky, but they do the job well for these businesses. Sometimes the financial investment in these systems just doesn’t justify another capital outlay to move to the cloud.

The big picture that we have painted is clear. We have a massive need for cloud computing but a fairly long list of challenges and risks that prevent wholesale uptake. And to be clear, this is not a global problem, this is an African challenge.

Thankfully Qlik has been proactive in cloud computing in Africa and has provided the perfect evolution, or as I prefer to describe it, a revolution: the ability for businesses to unlock the power of the cloud and data processing while staying on-prem.

This is achieved through a number of capabilities, notably a toolset that brings together three different technologies in a single subscription, removing the need for add-ons or extra purchases, it’s agnostic because no single business has one, unified source of data, and Qlik has its own cloud which means that businesses don’t get charged for cloud storage and computing power, which is crucial in a cost-sensitive environment.

Simply put, the use of a tool such as Qlik Forts enables a business to control its security because data stays at its source. It utilises the benefits of the cloud without any data leaving the on-prem systems. In essence, it addresses compatibility, cost, the pursuit of actionable insights from data, compliance and legacy concerns. Don’t be surprised to see more businesses working in a cloud environment within their own native systems as they realise there is another way to leverage the power of the cloud.