Business analytics, which is now a quite popular term that we are aware of in many of the sectors, market places and as well as in the organizations. Business analytics can be defined as it is the collection of methods as well as technologies for solving business related problems utilizing data analysis concept, existing statistical models and other quantitative approaches. In current technology environment companies deal with the huge amount of data to function on their own, also where data flow is also very much high nowadays. To run any organization in an efficient way it is very much important that what business decisions they make and on what basis. In such case business analytics acts as a most significant tool to convey business decisions based on the data and analysis of the same. Which in turn this created an opportunity to many individuals with skills on interpretation, analysis of data, also they were designated as professionals and hired by many organizations as Business analysts, Business Consultants etc to run any organization efficiently and effectively.

Data is a vital component nowadays in any of the organizations to make investments effectively, to frame business models, change implementation, strategy making, governance etc. Irrelevant of sectors we deal with the data in all the ways, where business analytics helps us in making proper decisions in workplaces based on the data which in turn boosts the performance of the organization or company.

Now we all know that; Business analytics is where we use quantitative methods to gain meaningful insights from the data to make informed business decisions. For the various levels of business analytics vast quantity of data is manipulated at various steps. Subject to various levels of the workflow and the necessity of data analysis, analytics has been divided into four main kinds – descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

• Descriptive Analytics:Characterizing the already available data by utilizing existing business analytics tools to have good understanding like what is actually happening or what actually happened in the past.
• Diagnostic Analytics: Concentrates on previous yield or performance to identify what and why it has happened. The output of the analysis is generally an analytic dashlet or dashboard.
• Predictive Analytics:It highlights on determining the feasible result by applying statistical models & ML (Machine Learning) techniques.
• Prescriptive Analytics:It is a kind of analytics which is utilized to suggest some sort of actions to be performed on the basis of data analysis.

DATA ANALYTICS vs. BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Before we move into next phase it is very much important to make a distinguish between data analytics and business analytics. Data analytic is where we make use of it to analyse, categorize, to sort, store, clean, to identify patterns, and also to interpret the gained insights by making use of  different statistical approaches, statistical techniques,big data methods,and various technologies, whereas Business Analytics is related with reporting and data, it’s main objective to gain insights from the data available and analysing the same, based upon this we make certain decisions or take necessary course of action whether it is on future, present or past.

Following are the ways that organizations and companies got benefited from using these business analytics techniques based on the data insights gained to improve their organizational performance.

ADVANTAGES OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS

• Eliminate guess work
• Get faster answer to your question
• More Informed Decision-Making
• Get understanding into customer nature
• Determine cross sell and upsell chances
• Greater Revenue
• Improved Operational Efficiency
• Get business related performance measure reports whenever we need

Companies seek candidates with analytical skills to take data driven decisions in case of problem solving or decision making in a business or in an organization. Also, few reports states that business analysis is one of the most important skills that company needs nowadays. Many institutions started providing courses, degrees, post graduate programs, certifications on business analytics by understanding the need of this particular program as an industry need currently and one of the bureaus has predicted that analytics jobs to grow by twenty-seven percentage by 2026 which is greater than the average of all the other jobs.

RAGHAVENDRA P V
I MBA, DSCE