From ivory tower to everyday app

The rise of the citizen data scientist

It used to be the case that the only people with the skills and appetite to undertake large-scale data analyses were specially trained data scientists or IT. Today, SAS is democratising analytics to put the power to know directly in the hands of every line of business employee. For partners that can only be good news; more prospective buyers within your customer base and more potential revenue.

How are we turning everyone into a data scientist?

The world is changing. Every line of business wants swift answers to their specific business questions – today, not in weeks. Consequently, we’re transforming the way BI is done. This means moving away from long batch processing where drilling down for richer detail was extremely difficult, and because analysis was so complex it was only performed on an ad hoc basis and relied heavily on the IT department.

By introducing the following features users are empowered to take the reins and become citizen data scientists themselves – a term coined by analysts, Gartner:

1. Visualisation: smart, simple ways to visualise results of analyses, users can gain relevant insights such as correlations, trends, spheres of influence, relationships, contributions and patterns.
2. Big data capabilities: all relevant data, from sales data to social media opinions, can be input into analytic models and thoroughly worked in order to deliver more meaningful insights and uncover hidden relationships. For example, the United Nations statistics department input over 300 million rows of data, using it with SAS Visual Analytics allows anyone in the organisation to interrogate this international trade data via PC or tablet.
3. Self-service tools: by putting the power in users’ hands with an intuitive set of tools, we are helping users to fail fast, learn and move on. By being able to create self-service reports, push results out to Microsoft productivity tools, and work on the go, users can take back control of the analytics process and better share intelligence and collaborate.
4. Democratisation of analytics: means that users don’t require coding skills, or a maths and statistics background to gain the benefits of real-time analytics. The powerfully intuitive nature of SAS solutions has in part led to them being positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the last three years.