I had a conversation with a dear friend the other day and one of the things we discussed was the ubiquitous mention of Citizen Data Scientists in technology and industry publications and conferences. My friend (who shall remain nameless), insisted that this was just another passing fancy and that Citizen Data Scientists were not really all that important in building the enterprise of the future.
If you’ve heard the Digital Transformation buzz, you probably have a lot of questions. Let’s dive into some of those questions and see if we can clear up the confusion!
If your team is using business intelligence (and it should be), you may be working with a more restrictive business solution that is not designed for a business user. If that is the case, you are missing an opportunity to cascade analytics throughout the organization and to optimize your resources and improve productivity. Self-Serve Business Intelligence solutions are designed with guidance and recommendations to guide a business user with average skills through the process of preparing and analyzing data and to encourage collaboration and data sharing across the enterprise.
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.
Digital Transformation occurs when an organization successfully exploits digital technologies, its processes, its core capabilities and its enterprise culture to create a rich digital business model that will advance the interests and success of the business. To plan and execute a Digital Transformation initiative, a business must understand what Dx is and what it is not and it must use that knowledge to build a comprehensive view of the organization, its current and desired culture and technology environment and its team strengths and weaknesses and customer needs.
Download the Whitepaper: Understanding Digital Transformation: What it Is and What it is Not
What is Digital Transformation and why should you care about it? Let’s keep it simple. Digital Transformation involves the use of new, ever-changing digital technology in an environment designed to encourage problem solving and collaboration. Digital Transformation assumes that a business organization truly values data-driven decisions and wishes to improve its team member value and productivity by increasing their data literacy and comfort level with using data to make decisions.
If your business wants to take on a Citizen Data Scientist initiative, it must enable its culture to support augmented analytics within the enterprise at every skill level and provide support to transform business users into the Citizen Data Scientist role. Citizen Data Scientists will incorporate the use of augmented analytics and enjoy the features of an augmented analytics solution that will support users of every skill level with auto-suggestions and guidance to help them choose visualization techniques and appropriate analytical techniques and algorithms to complete their analysis, share information with other users and make fact-based decisions.
Let’s cut to the chase! Results are everything and when you think of a task like preparing data for analytics, that task does not seem to have a direct connection to results. Or does it? Renowned technology research and analysis organization, Gartner, predicts that data and analytics organizations that provide agile, curated internal and external datasets for a range of content authors will realize twice the business benefits as those that do not.
If your business understands the value of self-serve data preparation and augmented analytics, but your IT team or senior management is concerned about data governance and data security, you need not worry. You can use self-serve data prep tools and self-serve data ETL for data extraction, transformation and loading and still ensure appropriate data governance.
Advanced Analytics is the new frontier of competition and business success. While some businesses have the luxury of employing data scientists and professional analysts to help them sift through and analyze data, others do not have the budget or the structure to support these roles and, even those who employ professional data scientists do not have unlimited resources or budgets.
