Business Analytics gathers insights from the data that help users to take
various business decisions and further used for automatizing and optimizing
business processes. It has no clear definition but according to Wiki, BA
refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuous iterative
exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and
drive business planning. Successful Business Analytics depends on high
quality data, highly skilled analysts who understand the technologies and the
business, and analysts having the commitment for correct decision making for
the organization.
Examples of BA:
· Data Mining (exploring the data and
finding out various patterns)
· Statistical analysis, quantitative
analysis (Why a particular result occurred?)
· Multivariate testing, A/B testing
(Conducting various experiments to test previous decisions)
· Predictive modelling, predictive
analytics (Forecasting the results)
BA is an umbrella term!
Types of Business Analytics
Reporting or Descriptive analytics
·
Its goal is to review the data and look for
indications of success or failure in any given marketing plan; it is a rear
view or a description of past events.
Modelling or Predictive analytics
·
It is the use of data to determine the probable
future outcome of an event or a likelihood of a situation occurring. In other
words, it tries to find rules for guessing or predicting the values of one or
more variables in a data set from the values of other variables in the data set.
Data-Driven Strategy
·
It is to strategize a company's growth through the
use of gathered data in making data-driven decisions
Clustering
·
It is a way of segmenting a diverse group into a
number of subgroups or clusters. It is used to group data that share similar
records together into clusters.
Affinity grouping
·
It is to determine which things should go together.
It looks for relationships between fields and field values to determine which
items go together. It is frequently used in retail chains to plan arrangement
of items on store shelves. It consists of finding a model that describes
association between items. It is used for predictive modelling and to describe
items that frequently occur together.
Visual Analytics/Data visualisation
·
Data visualization refers to technologies that
support visualization and sometimes interpretation of data and information. Visual
tools can help identify relationships such as trends.
Web Analytics
·
Web analytics is a tool for measuring website
traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research.
Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of
traditional print advertising campaigns, estimate how traffic to a website
changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides
information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page
views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends which is useful for market
research.
The Processes of Business
Analytics
Business
Intelligence and Business Analytics
The term Business Intelligence can be
interchangeably used with Business Analytics. Since BA is an umbrella term, BI
can be considered as a part of BA. Let us compare the two.
BI vs BA
|
Business Intelligence
|
Business Analytics
|
Answers the questions:
|
What happened?
When?
Who?
How many?
|
Why did it happen?
Will it happen again?
What will happen if we change x?
What else does the data tell us
that never thought to ask?
|
Includes:
|
Reporting (KPIs, metrics)
Automated Monitoring/Alerting
(thresholds)
Dashboards
Scorecards
OLAP (Cubes, Slice & Dice,
Drilling)
Ad hoc query
|
Statistical/Quantitative Analysis
Data Mining
Predictive Modeling
Multivariate Testing
|
References:
