Nature of the Opportunity/Problem

When organizations invest in filling the holes in their analytical capabilities, they see a reduction in the knowledge gap between their business users and their traditional data scientists (DS). These changes produce a more robust team that grows holistically as one analytical unit.

In today’s competitive market, it’s more urgent than ever to implement programs that level up your analysts’ skills and unlock some of the business benefits, such as:

Lessening demand on the central data team to enable increased throughput for strategic projects.
Enabling citizen data scientists to build higher quality, more impactful analytics products more quickly.
Increasing the impact of the analytics program across the entire organization by infusing the program with domain-level insights about the business.
Increasing employee satisfaction.
Reducing staff turnover.
Reducing spend on third-party consulting services.

These new capabilities enable an organization to shift some of the mundane tasks normally handled by a DS to less technical analysts, such as data cleaning and, to some extent, feature selection. Delegating the less complex data to less technical teams allows data scientists to focus on advanced tasks like modeling, machine learning experimentation, and operationalization of deployment. This also has a residual benefit, of retaining this valuable DS talent longer in your organization, as it provides them more bandwidth to hone their core skills.

By helping your information analysts perform DS-like tasks, you not only allow them to flex their full analytical capabilities at a lower cost, you also benefit by having the analysts pair those results with their already existing business acumen for the initial stages of data generation. This happens because the new data sources are more aligned with the business objectives, and the newly trained end user business analyst had the opportunity to explore these new raw streams. This can result in supercharging the insights that can become even more impactful to the business.