Welcome, Citizen Data Scientists

I recently attended a business intelligence conference and I was reminded how important data democratization is for every company. One of the most important things to consider is how crucial it is to give your business users good, easy-to-use tools for smart visualization, plug n' play predictive analysis and self-serve data preparation. It is one thing to SAY you want your business users empowered and accountable. It is another to expect them to use tools that are designed for IT or analysts or to leverage dashboards that are restrictive and frustrating.

If you want your business to make better, more timely decisions with full confidence in data and clear insight into the real issues, challenges and opportunities, you have to give users what they need. As they adopt the tools, and create and share reports and analysis, data and users will become popular and in sharing, the team will learn and create solutions that are far better than you expect and hope.

There are times when you'll want your analysts or IT team to create reports and help you analyze data but, on a day-to-day basis, companies have already proven the importance of giving analytical capability to their business users. Most decisions can and should be made by your team using their knowledge, skill and specific expertise to gather and interpret data and make decisions. These days, we call the informed, capable business user, a Citizen Data Scientist! These 'citizens' are better equipped to help you build your business and they are more engaged because they understand where they fit in the business and can clearly see how their efforts and decisions affect the future of the company.

Sounds like something we all want, right? If you want to give it a try, you can start here: Smarter/Better/BI,