The days of managing a business by opinion or ‘gut feeling’ are long past. Every business has competition – whether local or global or both and the only way to know that the business is performing against objectives and goals and is strategically competitive is to use measurable goals.
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.
When a business is looking for a business intelligence vendor, business managers will often look to a Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for a comparison of BI Tools. There are numerous choices listed in Self-Service BI Gartner reports and it may be difficult to determine which is best for your business.
When you consider data democratization and rolling out a BI tool or analytical solution to your team members across the enterprise, you have to think about how to ensure that team members can easily adopt analytics and use them in their day-to-day tasks with a clear understanding of the results.
If you stay up-to-date with your industry and market publications, you have probably heard a lot of buzz about natural language processing or NLP. In fact, whether you know it or not, you use NLP every day. When you type a question into Google, you are using NLP! The system translates your question and returns results to meet your needs.
If you are using SAP® in your business, you know that it takes time to plan, implement and train for this enterprise application. If your team wants to undertake a data democratization initiative and use data in various systems and data repositories to analyze and gain insight for business intelligence, you would be wise to select a business intelligence solution that can be easily integrated with SAP and allow your users to leverage familiar tools to perform analytics.
Key Performance Indicators, affectionately referred to as KPIs…or perhaps not so affectionately referred to, depending on your comfort level with KPIs and your experience with the effectiveness and value of KPIs.
There are many reasons for a business to consider a self-serve business intelligence solution for business users. If properly deployed, BI tools improve productivity, accuracy and speed of decisions and competitive advantage – among other things.
If you are contemplating a business intelligence tool for the first time, or if you are unhappy with your current BI tool and you want to find a better solution, you need to focus on the experience, skill and self-serve capabilities of the business intelligence company. Every business that is using a business intelligence initiative to improve data accuracy and decision-making is following the trend of data democratization and improved data literacy and choosing BI tools that are designed to be self-serve so business users can leverage features and functionality to make better decisions, to plan, forecast and measure results with more accuracy and dependability.
