Tag: Citizen Data Science

Data Literacy, Citizen Analysis, and the Shift to a Data‑Enabled Culture

I’ve never been fond of the phrase data‑driven. It can imply that people should surrender the wheel to whatever the chart says. I prefer data‑enabled: a culture where evidence is visible, disputable, and useful—where humans steer and data is the headlight, not the driver. That shift doesn’t start with a platform; it starts with literacy, and it grows when more people can do a little analysis for themselves.

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Citizen Data Analysts, Citizen Data Scientists, and Citizen Developers—What We Mean (and How They Work Together)

If you’ve been reading along here, you know our north star is putting data to work—safely—where decisions actually happen. Three personas keep showing up in that mission: Citizen Data Analysts, Citizen Data Scientists, and Citizen Developers. They’re adjacent, not identical. Here’s how we define them, how they differ, and how to enable each without creating chaos.

Quick definitions (with Gartner links)

Citizen Data Analyst (CDA)
A domain expert who turns governed data products and a semantic layer into decisions using self‑service BI (dashboards, KPI views, ad‑hoc analysis). Not a Gartner term; it’s our practical label for the power user of curated data.

Citizen Data Scientist (CDS)
A business user who goes beyond visualization to prototype models with guided/augmented tools. Gartner’s definition is often quoted as: “a person who creates or generates models … but whose primary job function is outside the field of statistics and analytics.” See Gartner: Citizen Data Scientist for the glossary entry; a commonly quoted rendering is captured here.

Related Gartner context: augmented analytics “also augments the expert and citizen data scientists by automating many aspects of data science [and] ML.” (Gartner)

Citizen Developer (CD)
A business user who builds apps/automations on approved low‑code platforms. Gartner is concise: a citizen developer is “a persona, not a title or targeted role.” See Gartner: Citizen Developer.

Continue reading “Citizen Data Analysts, Citizen Data Scientists, and Citizen Developers—What We Mean (and How They Work Together)”