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Business analytics (BA) refers to the continuous exploration of past business performance data to gain insights and drive planning. BA focuses on developing new understandings of performance based on analytical methods and data-driven decision making, while business intelligence traditionally focused on consistent metrics for measuring past performance and planning. BA makes extensive use of modeling, analysis, and fact-based management to support both human and automated decisions.

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Vanishree B R
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17 views

Blog 1

Business analytics (BA) refers to the continuous exploration of past business performance data to gain insights and drive planning. BA focuses on developing new understandings of performance based on analytical methods and data-driven decision making, while business intelligence traditionally focused on consistent metrics for measuring past performance and planning. BA makes extensive use of modeling, analysis, and fact-based management to support both human and automated decisions.

Uploaded by

Vanishree B R
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is Business analytics?

Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for continuous
iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive
business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding
of business performance based on data and statistical methods. In contrast, business
intelligence traditionally focuses on using a consistent set of metrics to both measure past
performance and guide business planning. In other words, business intelligence focuses on
description, while business analytics focuses on prediction and prescription.
Business analytics makes extensive use of analytical modelling and numerical analysis,
including explanatory and predictive modelling, and fact-based management to drive decision
making. It is therefore closely related to management science. Analytics may be used as input
for human decisions or may drive fully automated decisions. Business intelligence
is querying, reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), and "alerts."
In other words, querying, reporting, and OLAP are alert tools that can answer questions such
as what happened, how many, how often, where the problem is, and what actions are needed.
Business analytics can answer questions like why is this happening, what if these trends
continue, what will happen next (predict), and what is the best outcome that can happen
(optimize).
Examples of application
In healthcare, business analysis can be used to operate and manage clinical information
systems. It can transform medical data from a bewildering array of analytical methods into
useful information. Data analysis can also be used to generate contemporary reporting
systems which include the patient's latest key indicators, historical trends and reference
values.

 Decision analytics: supports human decisions with visual analytics that the user models to
reflect reasoning.
 Descriptive analytics: gains insight from historical data with reporting,
scorecards, clustering etc.
 Predictive analytics: employs predictive modelling using statistical and machine
learning techniques
 Prescriptive analytics: recommends decisions using optimization, simulation, etc.

Basic domains with analytics

 Behavioral analytics
 Cohort analysis
 Competitor analysis
 Cyber analytics
 Enterprise optimization
 Financial services analytics
 Health care analytics
 Marketing analytics
 Pricing analytics
 Retail sales analytics
 Risk & Credit analytics
 Supply chain analytics
 Talent analytics

Challenges
Business analytics depends on sufficient volumes of high-quality data. The difficulty in
ensuring data quality is integrating and reconciling data across different systems, and then
deciding what subsets of data to make available.
Previously, analytics was considered a type of after-the-fact method of forecasting consumer
behavior by examining the number of units sold in the last quarter or the last year. This type
of data warehousing required a lot more storage space than it did speed. Now business
analytics is becoming a tool that can influence the outcome of customer interactions. When a
specific customer type is considering a purchase, an analytics-enabled enterprise can modify
the sales pitch to appeal to that consumer. This means the storage space for all that data must
react extremely fast to provide the necessary data in real-time.
Competing on analytics
Thomas Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson
College argues that businesses can optimize a distinct business capability via analytics and
thus better compete. He identifies these characteristics of an organization that are apt to
compete on analytics:

 One or more senior executives who strongly advocate fact-based decision making and,
specifically, analytics
 Widespread use of not only descriptive statistics, but also predictive modeling and
complex optimization techniques
 Substantial use of analytics across multiple business functions or processes
 Movement toward an enterprise-level approach to managing analytical tools, data, and
organizational skills and capabilities

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