If you follow technology publications and predictions, you know that Citizen Data Scientists are the big news for business. By transforming business users into Citizen Data Scientists, the business can leverage the professional skills and knowledge of an individual team member and combine that knowledge with data analytics to get the best answers, forecast and predict, solve problems and identify business opportunities.
When a business chooses to follow the guidance of Gartner and embrace the Citizen Data Scientist initiative to transform business users and provide analytical tools for all team members, it must approach the initiative with appropriate planning.
Citizen Data Scientists…the predicted future of the organization! Gartner and other technology research firms have predicted the rise of Citizen Data Scientists as a way to complement and optimize data scientists and to democratize data and improve data literacy across the enterprise.
What is a Citizen Data Scientist and what is the role of a Citizen Data Scientist? It isn’t as complicated as you might think. A Citizen Data Scientist is a business user working in a professional capacity within an enterprise – one who is collaborative and curious by nature and willing and ready to adopt augmented analytics tools to prepare and analyze data and use that data to gain insight into business issues and opportunities. The role of a Citizen Data Scientist is to interact with and liaise with IT and data scientists to define use cases and refine data output to be used in making fact-based decisions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The benefits of advanced analytics are many and with augmented analytics support, the benefits are even more numerous.
You have probably heard a lot about the concept of Citizen Data Scientists in industry conferences and journals. Whether you are managing a business, or a team or you are a team member in a business, you should take heed of these discussions as they will definitely change the landscape of every type of business from start-ups and small companies to large enterprises, and you would be wise to get on board.
