What is Business Analytics and why you should care?

What exactly is Business Analytics (BA)?

 

In the rapidly changing digital economy, Business Analytics (BA) plays a major role in any organization. According to Gartner, BA solutions enable businesses to build models and simulations to create scenarios, understand realities and predict the future. This process includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics and statistics. These analytics solutions normally come with prebuilt industry content that is targeted at an industry business process; for example, claims or underwriting and more.

BA is also used for prescriptive analytics to mainly formulate optimization techniques to enhance business performance. For instance, it can be used to determine the cost of various products in a departmental store based on past and present set of data.

To simply put it in layman’s terms, Business Analytics breaks down information related to past performance for a business to develop business models for the future.

Importance and advantages of Business Analytics

 

One of the advantages of Business Analytics is that it enables one to make better and sound commercial decisions to remain competitive. It enhances profitability of the business, increases market share and revenue, and provides better return to shareholders as well. For example, McDonald’s relies on BA to customize services to diverse markets internationally.

Another plus point of Business Analytics is that it facilitates better understanding of available primary and secondary data, which again affect operational efficiency of businesses. Not only that, Business Analytics converts available data into valuable/strategic information which can be presented in any required format that is required by the decision maker.

EDB Singapore had projected that the value of regional big data and business analytics services will reach US$27 billion (about SG$37 billion) by 2022. 

Fun Fact

 

Individuals that possess the following attributes might find themselves attracted to this industry:

• You are naturally driven by curiosity and like to understand the ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘how’ of any situation would enjoy this field of work

• Being able to look at information and interpret meaning which aids in developing strategies for helping businesses succeed

• Fundamental skills related to analyzing data (SAS and Excel is a plus) would shine in this profession

• If you want to work with figures, you must be comfortable with numbers and mathematical formulas

• Finally, a keen eye for detail

Now, are you the right fit for Business Analytics? You might also be keen to find out more about our Certified Business Analytics Specialist  program.