If you are a business owner or a business team member who has been asked to consider the Citizen Data Scientist role, you may be wondering how it all works and whether you (or your team member) can handle the new role.
When choosing a BI tool and augmented analytics solution for your business, one of the most crucial concerns is the features and functionality of the prospective solution and how this solution will meet user and organizational needs. It is important to remember that there are also specific features a business should consider, like embedded BI and easy-to-employ Integration APIs, that will assure user adoption and appropriate ROI and TCO.
When a business considers business intelligence and augmented analytics initiatives, it should include Embedded BI and Integration APIs to improve ROI, TCO and user adoption. If an enterprise does not understand the risks of data silos, and restrictive analytics solutions, it is not likely to make the right choices. With appropriate planning and execution, businesses can create a solid foundation, and provide benefits for all users, managers and IT staff.
When a business engages its team members and asks them to take on the role of Citizen Data Scientist, there can be many misunderstandings regarding the new role. One of the most common misunderstandings relates to who does what in the role of analytics. Some common questions include:
If you are a business manager who wants to enable a Citizen Data Scientist environment, but you find yourself up against resistance, it is often because your business users believe that advanced analytics is just too hard for them to learn and that the use of these types of techniques and systems will slow them down and confuse their otherwise familiar processes.
Many businesses have embraced the Gartner prediction that transforms business users into Citizen Data Scientists to help organizations democratize analytics with simple tools that will improve the quality and timeliness of decisions. You can read white papers, industry articles and other publications that will support and articulate this approach to business flexibility, agility and success. But, if you do not embrace the culture change required to deploy this strategy across your enterprise, your Citizen Data Scientist initiative will not succeed.
Do you know what Key Influencer Analytics are? If not, you should! One of the most frustrating tasks a business user has in analytics is finding and gathering the right data for analysis and ensuring that all factors, variables and data that may affect the outcome of the analysis is included. That is why these activities are typically performed by Data Scientists, analysts or IT in many organizations. Without the ability to identify the right variables, and determine the relationships among these variables and business success, the business is likely to measure and attend to the wrong things.
If you own or work in a business, you know that, while you are busy doing what you do on a daily basis, things can change. The change itself is challenging but what is more challenging is staying abreast of what is changing, where it is changing and how it is impacting the business. If you aren’t aware of the change, things can sneak up on you. Your business can get off track and, if you aren’t aware of that misstep, you risk greater loss as time goes by. At the same time, the changes that occur that might provide a market opening or an opportunity can also fall by the wayside if you are not paying attention.
If your business has entrusted you with the responsibility of a new role, namely that of Citizen Data Scientist, you may think of it as extra work or some sort of punishment. Nothing can be further from the truth! As a business technology user, you are in a unique position to combine your market, domain and industry expertise and your professional knowledge with augmented analytics that will support your queries, your problem-solving initiatives and your desire to improve on productivity, performance and revenue.
If your business has designated you a Citizen Data Scientist, you may feel intimidated and unprepared to take on the role. You are probably a business professional with a lot of knowledge in your chosen career and area of focus and none in the field of data science or business analysis.
