What is business analytics and why it’s Important?

Business Analytics defines as a set of quantitative and qualitative approaches for deriving valuable insights from data. It includes many processes which apply business analytics techniques.

Who is a Business Analyst?

Business Analysts are those who have the skills and knowledge to analyze an organization’s business and make appropriate decisions on given data. Business Analysts help us understand the trends that we miss out on.

Responsibilities of Business Analyst

• Doing a requirement analysis to figure what is the requirement of the stakeholders.
• Gauging the business processes, being ready for the requirements, identify areas to improve on, and developing and implementing solutions.
• Key ongoing reviews of business processes and developing optimization strategies.
• Managing meetings and presentations to share ideas and findings.
• Documenting and communicating the results of your efforts.
• Collecting key information from meetings with various stakeholders and producing useful reports.
• Allocating resources and maintain cost efficiency.
• Prioritizing initiatives based on business needs and requirements.

Benefits of BA

BA used to make data-driven decisions. The insights obtained by BA enable these companies to automate and optimize their business processes. Data-driven companies make use of BA to achieve a competitive advantage because they are able to use the insights to:

• Explore data to find new patterns and relationships using data mining techniques.
• Perform statistical analysis and quantitative analysis to explain why certain results occur.
• Make use of predictive modeling to forecast future results based on past records or trends.

Differences between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics are related, though they are not exactly the same. BI involves the process of collecting data from all sources and preparing it for BA. BI is more of a first step for companies to take when they need the ability to make data-driven decisions. BA, on the other hand, is the analysis of the reports provided by Business Intelligence. While BI tells what happened, BA tells why it happened and whether it will happen again. Business Intelligence includes reporting, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, scorecards, and ad hoc queries. In contrast, BA includes statistical and quantitative analysis, data mining, predictive modeling, and multivariate testing.

BA Best Practices

Adopting and executing Business Analytics is not something a company can do overnight. If an organization follows some best practices for BA, they will get the levels of insight they seek and become more competitive and successful. Although your organization needs to determine which best practices are most fitting for your needs.

• Understand the objective for using BA. Define your business case and the target ahead of time.
• Define your criteria according to success and failure.
• Select your procedures and be sure you understand the data and relevant internal and external factors.
• Validate the process using your predefined success and failure criteria.

Business Analytics is important for remaining competitive and achieving success. When you implement BA best practices in place and get buy-in from all stakeholders, your organization will benefit from data-driven decision making.

To read an article about “What is Data Analytics – Introduction & Types | Data Analytics Tools”.