Business Analytics and Business Intelligence in a nutshell

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:

 https://wiki.smu.edu.sg/is101_2011/Business_analytics

http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/business-analytics-BA