Someone Said I’m Now a Citizen Data Scientist!  Now What?

What the Heck is a Citizen Data Scientist?

What do you have to know to be a Citizen Data Scientist? Who is the ideal candidate to be a Citizen Data Scientist? How does the whole Citizen Data Scientist thing work, anyway?

Let’s iron out the details! 

First, let’s define the ideal candidate for the Citizen Data Scientist role. A Citizen Data Scientist is NOT a data scientist. The Citizen Data Scientist role is adopted by a business user or team member, and that team member does not need statistical or analytical skills or advanced technical skills. The ideal candidate is a respected member of the business community and may be a power user who likes learning new things. He or she probably likes using Excel and loves to solve problems. Citizen Data Scientist candidates understand the business and want to use analytics to gain more insight. They are curious and they like to collaborate. Which is good, because they will be collaborating with other users and will act as a liaison between data scientists, analysts and IT to champion the use of data and fact-based decision-making in the user ranks.

Next, let’s talk about what the Citizen Data Scientist will do. A business user in a Citizen Data Scientist role will use data integrated from numerous sources to access and analyze data in an augmented analytics solution. These solutions are sophisticated, yet easy enough for the average user to adopt, and they allow users to generate models and analysis and to use metrics and facts to make decisions, make recommendations and share data with other users.

But, the Citizen Data Scientist doesn’t have to do it alone. If and when there is a need for strategic refinement of data models, the Citizen Data Scientist can hand off models to data scientists or to IT to refine data for strategic use and to advance goals and objectives.

Lastly, we should spent a moment talking about benefits. If you are a candidate for the Citizen Data Scientist role, what’s in it for you? The use of augmented analytics, smart data visualization, assisted predictive modeling, self-serve data prep, and simple natural language processing (NLP) search analytics allows you to quickly ask questions and get answers in a way that makes sense to you and to your role. You can support day-to-day decisions, gain insight and perspective, hypothesize and prototype to test theories, improve business agility and producer models that are useful for monitoring and managing tasks and team objectives and projects and for ongoing analytics and measurements.

For more information on Citizen Data Scientist initiatives and how to successfully implement this type of initiative in your business, explore these Citizen Data Scientist Blog Publications.

If you are a prospective Citizen Data Scientist, you don’t have to do this alone! Contact Us to today or Click Here to explore training for Citizen Data Scientists, designed to help you succeed on your Citizen Data Scientist journey.