The rise of the citizen data scientist

When Mark Pickett was a captain in the Marines, he knew he couldn't be there to make every decision for his soldiers.

"You can't rehearse every scenario, and there will be times when you can't communicate," he explained. "You want to groom your Marines to be able to rely on themselves and their unit."

It's not so different in the business world in this era of big data.

Now senior director for online analytics and business intelligence at Sears, Pickett has been an early champion of the so-called citizen data scientist movement, by which employees in multiple parts of an organization are empowered with the analytics tools and skills to get the answers they need from their data.

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