CITIZEN DATA SCIENTISTS

CITIZEN DATA SCIENTISTS

Developing Citizen Data Scientists will allow your organization to harness the skills necessary to use data to gain insights and competitive advantage

WHY DEVELOP CITIZEN DATA SCIENTISTS

Developing Citizen Data Scientists is one critical component in unleashing data to provide industry-leading insights within your organization. Without someone playing this role, all the money in the world spent on IT will not improve knowledge and decision-making.

There are four clear reasons why training employees with data science skills is attractive:

    1. Data science competencies are valuable now, and will only become more central to the skills desired in a majority of future employees. A widely available Citizen Data Science program sets the standard now that data science is not something that only a few people do in the organization, but something everyone has some responsibility for doing in their specific area.
    2. Training many existing team members will be less expensive and spread out the knowledge in beneficial ways when compared to adding a few trained data scientists who will take a long time to learn the business before they are valuable.
    3. Because data scientists are in high demand, they move around a lot; putting your eggs in a few baskets means losing institutional knowledge when they go.
    4. If you already have data scientists on staff, organizations will still benefit by having more people with data scientist skills. When business side staff and leaders possess these skills, it makes the data scientist team more effective and productive.

WHAT IS A CITIZEN DATA SCIENTIST, AND WHY ARE THEY IMPORTANT?

A Citizen Data Scientist is someone who has developed core competencies in the following:

  • Understanding the harvesting and storing of potentially valuable data
  • Using modern tools to analyze data and create new information and knowledge for the organization
  • Communicating and visualizing the data in clear and powerful ways
  • Strategizing ways to derive value from data and preparing it for cutting-edge technologies (e.g., AI, Data-Driven Products, etc.)
  • Building tools for the business side to extract repeated value from streams of data
  • The ability to help design data extraction and usage models on new products of services
  • The ability to work with customers to help them get access to data we can generate that they would find valuable

Excited to share that I received my Citizen Data Scientist 101 Program Certification this week! Making data-driven decisions has always been important to me, but learning how to more effectively communicate what story the data tells has been a great professional development experience.

Big thanks to Matthew Bertram and Future Point of View for leading the charge. Thank you to Storage Solutions for continuing to invest in me.

Lauren Zak, Storage Solutions

CITIZEN DATA SCIENTIST DEVELOPMENT MODEL

When you hire a traditionally trained data scientist, the expectation is that they learned a majority of what they needed in school and are ready to add value on day one. This isn’t possible, because it takes a considerable time for a trained data scientist to learn your organization and industry.

It takes time and effort to develop competencies and skills. This is not the traditional training route a data scientist would have gone through in school. The goal with our approach is to open up areas of competency to the Citizen Data Scientists, gradually, in order for them to learn how to add value to the organization in new areas over time.

Here is a suggested path that we would customize to build a Citizen Data Scientist Program.

LEVEL 101

Foundational Knowledge

This level is an overview of the responsibilities, tools, and capabilities of the organization, as well as the techniques. It covers the basics of the current state of the organization’s data, our Data Activation Model, and skills such as data visualization, mashups, rules and triggers, and predictive analytics.

LEVEL 201

Advanced Internal Lab

Citizen Data Scientists get more hands-on in this level. The goal is to understand current reporting and data resources in each department, and to begin building and refreshing departmental reporting with an eye for new analysis and visualization.

LEVEL 301

Advanced External Lab

Sessions in this level will advance the thinking for Citizen Data Scientists on the ways the organization can use data to realize external value to help or sell to customers. This includes areas like Internet of Things devices and machine intelligence as a service that drive revenue.

ONGOING

Rivers of Information®

After the formal program is completed, attendees are encouraged to continue learning on their own through the Data Activation River of Information they build along the way. You can learn more about our Rivers of Information process here

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR CITIZEN DATA SCIENTIST PROGRAMS