What is business analytics ?

Introduction

Business analytics (BA) is the practice of iterative, methodical exploration of an organization’s data, with an emphasis on statistical analysis. Business analytics is used by companies committed to data-driven decision-making.

You can simply say Business analytics is a method  in which it uses tools and  techniques to turn data into meaningful insights, so that data could be from spreadsheets,  traditional databases and it could be also from social media such as Twitter, Facebook and many more, and then we use tools and techniques such statistical model or from Machine learning  something and then hope at the end of thew day  we get some business insights out to it. If you look at the diagram below, it is pretty straightforward but it is not that simple to analyse data in just few steps (figure a), its more than that what we feel what business analytics is, lets focus on second diagram.

we can say it Shows varieties of data input in different formats, we get lots of data such as good data, messy data and garbage data that we have to scrub it to Clean up to make useable and also we get lots of garbage data along with other data which is not  really helpful, to make it useful we have to fight data battle which is time consuming and it can be harmful sometime.

Types of analytics

• Analytics follows a process which is similar to the scientific method
• Optimize pricing to boost revenue
• Segment customers to tailor product offers
• Pinpoint bottlenecks and failure in our supply chain

Process

• Grabbing the data that we need
• Storing the data
• Cleaning of data which is not relevant
• Analyze the data that we need to focus on
• Visualising  the data which will be focused
• Interpret it in a recommend insights

 SAMPLE ARCHITECTURE

1. TRADITIONAL ANALYTICS

2. BIG DATA ANALYTICS

3. EXCEL POWER USER

Challenges

Data often needs lots of cleaning

• This can sometimes be the most frustrating task
• Data is rarely in the form you need it in.

Data is much more unstructured

• It does not all come from relational databases or spreadsheets, it can be from pdf, mp3, jpg, doc and xls. format.

Data volumes are growing – fast

• Traditional models have difficulty handling it
• 90 %of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years.

Good analytics does not solve bad business process

• If the process produces poor data, the analytics will be meaningless or even harmful, if its used to make important decisions.