Overview

As Big Data continues to grow, so does the demand for business analytics professionals. A deluge of abstract information exists, spurred over two decades ago by the internet and accelerating at a significantly faster pace over the past few years. The long-used database management and analysis techniques no longer suffice, particularly where unstructured data like product reviews and social media posts is concerned. Data analysis careers—business analytics, in addition to business intelligence and data science roles—address the new methods for organizing, gaining insights from, and making predictions with this steadily increasing amount of information and frequently incorporate computer science and other technical knowledge.

Whether you’ve spent the past few decades in an analytical role or you’re exploring the myriad of computer science applications, you might be wondering, “What is business analytics?” Here’s a primer on this burgeoning field and the skills needed to start a career.

The Definition of Business Analytics

Business analytics is the process of transforming data into insights to improve business decisions. Data management, data visualization, predictive modeling, data mining, forecasting simulation, and optimization are some of the tools used to create insights from data. Yet, while business analytics leans heavily on statistical, quantitative, and operational analysis, developing data visualizations to present your findings and shape business decisions is the end result. For this reason, balancing your technical background with strong communication skills is imperative to do well in this field.

At its core, business analytics involves a combination of the following:

--> identifying new patterns and relationships with data mining;
--> using quantitative and statistical analysis to design business models;
--> conducting A/B and multi-variable testing based on findings;
--> forecasting future business needs, performance, and industry trends with predictive modeling; and
--> communicating your findings in easy-to-digest reports to colleagues, management, and customers.

Importance of Business Analytics

Business analytics is a methodology or tool to make a sound commercial decision. Hence it impacts functioning of the whole organization. Therefore, business analytics can help improve profitability of the business, increase market share and revenue and provide better return to a shareholder. Facilitates better understanding of available primary and secondary data, which again affect operational efficiency of several departments. Provides a competitive advantage to companies. In this digital age flow of information is almost equal to all the players. It is how this information is utilized makes the company competitive. Business analytics combines available data with various well thought models to improve business decisions. Converts available data into valuable information. This information can be presented in any required format, comfortable to the decision maker.

Evolution of Business Analytics

Business analytics has been existence since very long time and has evolved with availability of newer and better technologies. It has its roots in operations research, which was extensively used during World War II. Operations research was an analytical way to look at data to conduct military operations. Over a period of time, this technique started getting utilized for business. Here operation’s research evolved into management science. Again, basis for management science remained same as operation research in data, decision making models, etc.

As the economies started developing and companies became more and more competitive, management science evolved into business intelligence, decision support systems and into PC software.

Scope of Business Analytics

--> Business analytics has a wide range of application and usages. It can be used for descriptive analysis in which data is utilized to understand past and present situation. This kind of descriptive analysis is used to asses’ current market position of the company and effectiveness of previous business decision.
--> It is used for predictive analysis, which is typical used to asses’ previous business performance.
--> Business analytics is also used for prescriptive analysis, which is utilized to formulate optimization techniques for stronger business performance.
--> For example, business analytics is used to determine pricing of various products in a departmental store based past and present set of information.