The global pandemic of 2020 has been challenging in many ways. As world, community and health organizations struggle to collaborate on strategies and to provide supplies and direction to citizens, each resident, refugee, adult, child, teacher, essential worker, healthcare provider, business owner, employee, neighbor and parent must make an individual decision about personal and family safety.
Author: Kartik Patel
My business success is very important to me and, while I have many management responsibilities, I really try to focus on the people we hire. They are the heart and soul of our company and they are the engine of our business. I try to interview many of the employees we hire because I value the team concept and the contribution of every person. I also want to ensure that the people we hire are a good fit for our team environment, our values and the skills and knowledge we need to succeed.
What Are Citizen Data Scientists?
Citizen Data Scientists represent a new breed of business analysts – a group of individuals with diverse business responsibilities and training, who wield sophisticated analytical tools, and employ complex methods of analysis to improve business results – all without the training or assistance of data scientists or IT team members. Citizen Data Scientists are business users who leverage the knowledge and skill they have developed through professional training and business roles to navigate business intelligence and advanced analytical tools to answer business questions, identify trends and patterns and develop new competitive strategies to support business decisions.
As business people, we are often presented with what might seem like a great opportunity. Maybe we have a chance to open another location, or to buy out a competitor or to add a product or service to our existing portfolio or to acquire more customers, resources, material or equipment.
Augmented Analytics is the Next Generation of BI Tools for Business Users
As business intelligence solutions and BI Tools evolve into Augmented Analytics, business users can achieve valuable insight and take appropriate action to optimize resources and enable continuous improvement. As Gartner has predicted, the market is responding to business needs by transforming business intelligence tools into sophisticated Advanced Analytics that are easy-to-use. These augmented analytics solutions support the needs of the average business user, improve productivity and collaboration, and assure data democracy and Data Literacy across the organization.
Data drives decisions and, in today’s competitive business environment, the kind of fact-based decisions achieved through Advanced Analytics are mandatory. These data-driven decisions ensure that a business does not make a misstep or have to guess at forecasts, plans and the root cause of problems.
If you live in this world, you know that there are people you want to know, people with whom you want a relationship, people who are helpful, trustworthy and productive. There are also those who show potential and promise; those relationships you choose to nurture in hopes of seeing a positive outcome. You also know that there are people who will waste your time and money and frustrate you until you end the relationship. Then there are the people who have some attribute or character trait that makes it hard to leave them behind. They might have a special skill or they might be popular or worth knowing in some way. But, you will definitely pay a price for continuing this relationship.
The average business user does not have a full grasp of Advanced Data Discovery or Data Preparation methods, and most organizations would not want business users to waste precious time trying to navigate the complexities of a manual data preparation process. If a business provides a solid foundation for self-serve business intelligence with augmented data preparation features, business users can quickly and easily prepare data for analysis and get the results they need to move forward and make decisions.
Creativity is the lifeblood of an enterprise! But, it is easy to get into a rut and do what has worked in the past. If a business is to succeed, it must constantly generate new ideas and new ways to address the market and its consumers. Augmented Data discovery and the new world of self-serve tools has added an interesting dimension to this discussion as it encourages business users to become Citizen Data Scientists and encourages organizations to embrace data democratization.
Data Literacy is a hot topic in business today.
As businesses struggle to remain competitive and to do more with less, every enterprise is looking for a way to optimize resources, and to get the most out of every team member. To do that, the business management team must leverage the knowledge and skills of each team member as those skills relate to their role and their responsibilities. Businesses must use team member knowledge gleaned from experience and education and merge that knowledge with data and analytics to make context-based, data-driven decisions.
