The importance of Citizen Data Scientists has become a focus for the wise business executive and manager. Understanding Citizen Data Scientists and how they can supplement analytics and help the organization to be more successful can be a real competitive advantage for a business, whether that business is in a local market, a global industry, a vertical niche, or a broad corporate footprint.
In this article, we focus on the benefits of Citizen Data Scientists, assuming a well-conceived program. These benefits assume the identification and selection of an appropriate augmented analytics solution to support business users and the business organization.
Benefits to the Enterprise
Turning business users into Citizen Data Scientists can have many benefits for the business organization.
- Allows the organization to improve data democratization and leverage all-important data to make objective decisions.
- Creates a metrics-based decision-making process that is measurable and can be easily adapted and managed.
- Improves the value of team member contribution.
- Optimizes professional skills of data scientists and IT professionals and allows them to focus on strategic and operational tasks and goals.
- Improves competitive advantage by optimizing resources, skills, knowledge, and data
- Allows the organization to be agile and to adapt quickly to the market and to changing customer behavior.
- Identifies challenges and issues before they become a real problem.
- Identifies opportunities for growth and customer engagement.
Benefits to Data Scientists
- Allows Data Scientists to focus on strategic initiatives rather than constantly responding to business user requests.
- Allows Data Scientists to collaborate and engage with business users in a meaningful way to build teams and expand knowledge and understanding of the business.
- Creates the foundation for additional tools and techniques that can be leveraged by Data Scientists with advanced skills.
Benefits to IT Professionals
- Enables IT professionals to focus on day-to-day and strategic objectives and tasks without having to respond to business user requests for reports and information from data repositories.
- Provides additional data governance and the ability to monitor and track “popular” data and reports and to create environs that offer users and data scientists the right support.
- Allows IT professionals to collaborate with business users and data scientists to better support the organization and to identify opportunities for their own growth and potential.
Benefits to Business Users
- Builds an understanding of data in a way that is meaningful to a business user role and responsibilities.
- Supports fact-based decision-making and alleviates issues resulting from decisions made by guesswork and opinion.
- Allows users to easily integrate and gather data for analytics and to leverage sophisticated tools in an intuitive environment.
- Improves business user data literacy and data democratization providing information that is crucial to team members and to the successful completion of tasks and workflow.
- Supports day-to-day analytics and allows business users to make clear, concise recommendations and suggestions to improve outcomes.
- Allows business users to collaborate with data scientists and IT professionals for refinement of analytics to take data insight to the next level for strategic decisions.
- Enables career advancement and expands knowledge, team visibility, and success.
- Ensures that all team members within the enterprise have the right information to do their jobs and to support organizational goals and objectives.
The risks of empowering citizen data scientists are often discussed in industry publications, so it is important to mention this side of the argument. Citizen Data Scientist pros and cons typically fall into these general categories:
- Business Users should not be given access to data because of security or data governance concerns.
Note: The right augmented analytics tools and solutions will provide multi-layered security and allow IT to create appropriate access to data and ensure the security and privacy of the data the executive management team wishes to isolate or guard.
- Analytics is not appropriate for business users because they can’t understand the data or reports and may use the data inappropriately.
Note: While every business usersmay not need to use data analytics every day, many will. Roles and responsibilities will dictate this need and, with the right solution, even users with average technology skills can gather and create analytics that are easy to understand and will guide the team to clear, concise results and decisions.
- The use of analytics in the general business community is not necessary and does not provide value.
Note: There is ample research to illustrate the value of an educated team, and the more information your team has to make the right decision, the less rework and missteps the organization will experience. Think of your team as an army. Everyone has to know what direction they are headed and have the information they need to get the job done, or your success will be at risk. Provide the support your team needs to learn the new approach and trust them to apply their market, industry and functional knowledge to analytics to achieve the best outcome and the clearest decisions.
- The cost of providing analytics to business users is too high and is not supported by the value it provides
Note: The right augmented analytics solution does not have to be expensive, or difficult to implement or learn. Assess your current situation and your needs and choose a solution that will support your team and your budget and schedule. It IS possible and it will provide numerous benefits and add value far beyond the cost of the solution.
Turning business users into Citizen Data Scientists is a process that should not be taken lightly — but that doesn’t mean it is impossible or even daunting. It simply means you must prepare and, like any other shift within your organization, you must adapt your culture, your technology, your business processes, and your workflow.
