Find Out the How of the Citizen Data Scientist Approach
In 2016, the technology research firm, Gartner, coined the term ‘Citizen Data Scientist,’ and defined it as ‘a person who creates or generates models that leverage predictive or prescriptive analytics, but whose primary job function is outside of the field of statistics and analytics.’
‘When business users make the transition to Citizen Data Scientists with access to augmented analytics solutions, they can provide additional value to the team, to managers and executives and allow IT and data scientists to focus on strategic goals.’
In the ensuing years, the Citizen Data Scientist role has become more refined, and those businesses that embrace this approach have seen real benefits. But just who are Citizens Data Scientists, and how does a business recognize candidates and benefit from enabling this role?
How Do I Find Citizen Data Scientist Candidates Within My Business? You will find your Citizen Data Scientist candidates among your business users and team members. They are curious and eager to learn new skills to contribute to the organization and to hone their skills for career advancement. Team members who make great Citizen Data Scientists are often power users, and are acknowledged as leaders within their own team. They are NOT IT professionals, analysts or data scientists but they share a common characteristic for precision and wanting to get it right the first time.
What Does a Citizen Data Scientist Do? Within the context of their roles and responsibilities, every business user needs clear, meaningful information to make fact-based decisions and recommendations. Citizen Data Scientists use data to create reports on a daily basis. As the Citizen Data Scientist role evolved, team members have leveraged the advantages of this data to share reports, to create and format presentations for recommendations and suggested changes to support pricing decisions, hiring, production, new products and services, financial investments, marketing and advertising campaigns, and many other decisions. As the movement grows within your organizations, you can enable data democratization and improve data literacy. Citizen Data Scientists can also work with IT, data scientists and business analysts to share their research and analytics when the business feels it is necessary to take the analytics to another level to ensure credibility for strategic decisions.
What Tools and Training Does a Citizen Data Scientist Need? One of the primary reasons the Gartner predictions have come to fruition is he evolution of the business intelligence (BI) and augmented analytics market to support the concept of Citizen Data Scientists. Today’s analytics solutions are easy-to-use, self-serve tools driven by Natural Language Processing (NLP), and machine learning, as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI). All of these technologies come together to support the business user and provide tools that are sophisticated in their functionality, yet intuitive and easy for a business user. These tools do not require IT skills or data science knowledge. When the team uses these tools, they can adopt a common language and techniques to work with IT and data scientists to create use cases and refine and share reports, formats and outcomes. The more complete, and intuitive the solution, the less training and onboard time the user will require. There are simple, Free Training Courses available that can help your business and your team understand the uses and benefits of this approach and enable user adoption.
When business users make the transition to Citizen Data Scientists with access to augmented analytics solutions, they can provide additional value to the team, to managers and executives and allow IT and data scientists to focus on strategic goals. Using Augmented Analytics Tools like self-serve data preparation to gather and prepare data, and smart data visualization to receive suggestions and recommendations on how to best view data, users can combine predictive analytics to forecast and model, and sophisticated tools like anomaly monitoring, key influencers, and sentiment analysis to gain crucial insight into changes in customer buying behavior, supplier issues, product time-to-market, trends, patterns and opportunities with dependable metrics to make data-driven decisions.
‘The Citizen Data Scientist role has become more refined, and those businesses that embrace this approach have seen real benefits.’
If your business wishes to capitalize on the potential of the Citizen Data Scientist approach, it important to work with an IT Partner who can help you define your requirements and strategize for optimal success, providing the augmented analytics tools and knowledge of the industry that is required to position you for success.
Original Post : Is the Citizen Data Scientist Approach Right For My Business?
