What is business analytics?
February 8, 2018Business analytics is a method of diving in organization's data, using statistical analysis to explore the hidden information in the data. The ultimate goal of business analytics is to enhance the view of business and to support decision making process.
In those recent years, the term data-driven business has been emerged to indicate those companies treat their data as an assets and utilize it as the important competitive advantages. Sale and marketing, customer relation management are frontier areas that those companies aiming at. The business are transforming with data-back decision making. It is the trend, unavoidable trends that those who do not utilize will be left behind.
There are three (3) types of business analytics:
Descriptive analytics (Business Intelligence)
Descriptive analytics is normally used to track the performance of a business. It answers the question of how good is the state of business within specific timeframe. It answer the question of
- What happens in business?
- Who involved?
- When?
- Size of effects?
There are boom of tools for this kind of descriptive analytics that we can name some such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and Qlik. Those tools will help organization to get insight view of current state of business, setting up the business alert through threshold, real-time report and so on. The tools are even made easier so that people with little knowledge of data science can access and use. There are no need of data analyst, although better to have, to use the tools.
Predictive analytics
If descriptive analytics is the basic of business analytics, the predictive analytics is advanced one. It use the data to sketch out the trends and predict the future outcomes. This is difficult area and normally required data expert in an organization. The work involves so much in building predictive model which can be simple as linear regression or complex as neural network AI.
Prescriptive analytics
This is the highest level of business analytics in which the past business performance will be used to create recommendations to handle similar situations in the future. It can help to answer questions of
- Why did it happens?
- Will it happens again?
- What will happens if we change X?
- What else data tell us what we never thought to ask?
Do not confuse this with predictive analytics since predictive analytics may show us the trends, the possible outcomes but it does not tell us why. On the other hands, the prescriptive does. Predictive analytics know what will happens but prescriptive analytics know why it happens. It can simulate the situation when some variables change. This advance will provide the management level in an organization the ability to browse through the options and know what will happen. Furthermore, it can tell us things we are not aware of. It kills the business risk of being unaware of unknown problems.
Business Analytics is wide area and the it will change business profoundly. The recent technology such as big data, cloud computing, deep learning makes us to get close to business analytics ever.
Some questions related to KoolReport
Where is KoolReport now in this big picture?
KoolReport now is early stage of business analytics. Specifically, it is in the state of descriptive analytics (business intelligence), the lowest level. It helps to unite data from different sources, process and summarize it then visualize it in meaningful way. It is suitable for creating report (KPI. metrics), online dashboard (the summarization of current state of business), OLAP(pivot, cube, slice, drilling report).
It is like a baby need to learn crawling before he/she can walk. We believe that doing well in this stage will be a foundation for us to move to the next.
Where KoolReport is heading to?
Of course, we want to move up step by step to the latest level of business analytics.
Why are you confident?
KoolReport is built as open-source framework for reporting. Why? Because it will be open to any contribution of third party. Everyone can build extended packages to process data. The hidden power of KoolReport is lying in its lego structure in which extended package can be used in plug and play manner. KoolReport hopes to be the hub to connect business who need data processing solution and third party who can provide it. In general, we aim at creating a market for it. And by this way, KoolReport will have chance to move up step by step from lowest level of business analytics to the highest one.
