What is Business Analytics: Fundamentals Every Beginner Needs to Know

What is Business Analytics?

Business Analytics may be defined as refining past or present business data using modern technologies. They are used to build sophisticated models for driving future growth. A general Business Analytics process may include Data Collection, Data Mining, Sequence Identification, Text Mining, Forecasting, Predictive Analytics, Optimization, and Data Visualization.

Every business today produces a considerable amount of data in a specific way. Business Analytics now are leveraging the benefits of statistical methods and technologies to analyze their past data. This is used to uncover new insights to help them make a strategic decision for the future. 

Business Intelligence, a subset of the Business Analytics field, plays an essential role in utilizing various tools and techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to predict and implement insights into daily operations.  

Thus, Business Analytics brings together fields of business management, and computing to get actionable insights. These values and inputs are then used to remodel business procedures to generate more efficiency and build a productive system. 

After going through What is Business Analytics, let us understand more about its evolution.

Evolution of Business Analytics

Technologies have been used as a measure to improve business efficiency since the beginning. Automation has played a considerable role in managing and performing multiple tasks for large organizations. The unprecedented rise of the internet and information technology has further boosted the performance of businesses. 

With advancement today, we have Business Analytics tools that utilize past and present data to give businesses the right direction for their future. 

As we now have a stronghold on What is Business Analytics, let us next look into the types of business analytics techniques.

Types of Business Analytics Techniques

Business analytics techniques can be segmented in the following four ways:

1. Descriptive Analytics: This technique describes the past or present situation of the organization's activities. 
2. Diagnostic Analytics: This technique discovers factors or reasons for past or current performance. 
3. Predictive Analytics: This technique predicts figures and results using a combination of business analytics tools.
4. Prescriptive Analytics: This technique recommends specific solutions for businesses to drive their growth forward. 

A complete business analytics life cycle starts from raw data received from the devices or services, then collecting data in an unstructured type, then processing and analyzing data to draw actionable insights. These are then integrated into business procedures to deliver better outcomes for the future. 

In order to extend our learning on What is Business Analytics, let us learn the various applications.

Business Analytics Applications

Business Analytics is now systematically integrated across several applications in the field of supply chain management, customer relationship management, financial management, human resources, manufacturing, and even build smart strategies for sports too.

How Does Business Analytics Work?

Business analytics begins with several foundational processes before any data analysis occurs. A smaller sample data set gets used for initial analysis. Spreadsheets with statistical functions and sophisticated data mining and predictive modeling software are both examples of analytics tools. The raw data shows patterns and relationships. The analytical process then iterates until the business goal is achieved by posing new questions.

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Importance of Business Analytics 

• Business analytics can transform raw data into more valuable inputs to leverage this information in decision making. 
• With Business Analytics tools, we can have a more profound understanding of primary and secondary data emerging from their activities. This helps businesses refine their procedures further and be more productive. 
• To stay competitive, companies need to be ahead of their peers and have all the latest toolsets to assist their decision making in improving efficiency as well as generating more profits. 

Now that we have added more value into our learning on What is Business Analytics by learning the importance, let us next understand its scope.

The Scope of Business Analytics

Business Analytics has been applied to a wide variety of applications. Descriptive analytics is thoroughly used by businesses to understand the market position in the current scenarios. Meanwhile, predictive and prescriptive analytics are used to find more reliable measures for businesses to propel their growth in a competitive environment. 

In the last decade, business analytics is among the leading career choices for professionals with high earning potential and assisting businesses to drive growth with actionable inputs. 

We have understood well about what Business Analytics is, let us next understand its benefits.

The Benefits of Business Analytics 

To club in one phrase: Business Analytics brings actionable insights for businesses. However, here are the main benefits of Business Analytics:

1. Improve operational efficiency through their daily activities. 
2. Assist businesses to understand their customers more precisely.
3. Business uses data visualization to offer projections for future outcomes.
4. These insights help in decision making and planning for the future.
5. Business analytics measures performance and drives growth.
6. Discover hidden trends, generate leads, and scale business in the right direction.

We have learned all about What is Business Analytics, let us next see how different it is from business intelligence.

Difference Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

Business Intelligence(BI) uses the past and present to identify trends and patterns in the organizational procedures, while Business Analytics determines the reasons and factors that led to present situations. Business Intelligence focuses mainly on descriptive analysis, while Business Analytics deals with predictive analysis. BI tools are part of Business Analytics that helps understand the Business Analytics process better. 

Business Analytics vs. Data Analytics

Data analytics is the process of analyzing data sets to make decisions about the information contained within them. The endeavor of business goals or insights is not a prerequisite for using data analytics. Business analytics is a part of this broader practice.

Business Analytics vs. Data Science

Analytics gets used by data science to guide decision-making. Data scientists investigate data using cutting-edge statistical techniques. They let the data's features direct their analysis. Data science isn't always required, even when sophisticated statistical algorithms get used on data sets. That's because genuine data science investigates solutions to open-ended questions. But business analytics aims to address a particular query or issue.

Common Challenges of Business Analytics

When attempting to implement a business analytics strategy, organizations may run into issues with both business analytics and business intelligence:

• Too many data sources: Business data is getting produced by a broad range of internet-connected devices. They frequently create various data types, which must get incorporated into an analytics strategy.  
• Lack of skills: Some companies, mainly small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), may find it tough to find candidates with the necessary business analytics knowledge and abilities.
• Data storage limitations: Before determining how to process data, a company must decide where to store it. 

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Business Analytics Examples and Tools

Many business analytics and business intelligence tools can automate advanced data analytics tasks. Here are a few examples of commercial business analytics software:

• Knime Analytics Platform includes machine learning and high-performance data pipelining
• Dundas Business Intelligence has automated trend forecasting and an intuitive interface
• Qlik's QlikView has data visualization and automated data association features
• Sisense is renowned for its data warehousing and dynamic text-analysis capabilities
• Splunk comes with a user-friendly interface and data visualization capabilities
• Tableau offers sophisticated capabilities for natural language processing and unstructured text analysis.
• Tibco Spotfire is an automated statistical and unstructured text analysis tool with powerful abilities.

Organizations should consider the following factors when choosing a business analytics tool: 

• The sources from which their data gets derived
• The kind of data that requires the analysis
• The tool's usability

Roles and Responsibilities in Business Analytics

The primary duty of business analytics professionals is to gather and analyze data to affect the strategic choices that an organization makes. The following are some projects for which they could perform the analysis:

• Identifying strategic opportunities from data patterns 
• Identifying potential issues the company might face and possible solutions
• Making a budget and business forecast
• Tracking business initiative progress
• Updating stakeholders on business objective progress
• Comprehending KPIs
• Comprehending regulatory and reporting requirements

Employers typically look for the following skills when hiring for these positions:

• An understanding of stakeholder analysis
• Familiarity with process modeling
• Analytical problem-solving
• Oral and written communication skills
• Fundamental knowledge of IT systems, including databases
• Attention to detail
• Familiarity with business analytics tools and software
• The capacity to visualize data 

Career and Salary Trends in Business Analytics

For someone with a background in business analytics, there are many options. According to PayScale, some standard job titles and yearly salaries are as follows:

• Business systems analyst: $70,155
• Business analyst: $69,785
• Business analyst: $69,639
• Senior business analyst: $86,050
• Senior business analyst: $51,009

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A Career in Business Analytics

The role of Business Analytics professionals may change accordingly to meet organizational goals and objectives. Several individual profiles are closely associated with business analytics when dealing with data. 

In this competitive age, business analytics has revolutionized the procedures to discover intelligent insights and gain more profits using their existing methods only. Business Analytics Techniques also help organizations personalize customers with more optimized services and even include their feedback to create more profitable products. Large organizations today are now competing to stay top in the markets by utilizing practical business analytics tools. 

Several business analytics tools are available in the market that offers specific solutions to match requirements. Professionals might need business analytics skills, like understanding and expertise of statistics or SQL to manage them. 

Beginners can also test their knowledge or prepare for their interviews using a Business Analytics free practice test. 

However, if you wish to strengthen your analytical skills, and make a mark in the field of business analytics, you must enroll in Simplilearn’s Post Graduate Program in Business Analysis right away. will help you gain the knowledge you need to turn your organization’s data into a tactical asset to generate business value. Make data-driven strategic decisions for your organization with this Business Analytics for Strategic Decision Making program by IIT Roorkee. Explore and enroll now!