Getting Ready for Analytics

In today’s rapidly changing business world, it is critical for business leaders to have the right insight and data to make the right calls at the right time. Finding the right blend of what, why and how to use this enormous amount of data is something that needs attention in present day competitive business environment.

Business strategies and operational decisions are being undertaken based on the analysis provided by past operational data. Hence it is tremendously important for global business entities to equip themselves with the emerging technologies like business analytics software for better decision making and forecasting.

Business Decisions + Analytics Software = Game Changer

The management science which is a combination of predictive modelling and decision-making, can be termed as Business Analytics.

• While 2014 saw the increased use of cloud analytics for data in cloud apps, in 2015, the use of cloud based analytics started expanding to include on premise data.
• Adoption of big data platforms like Hadoop and NoSQL continues to grow in 2015 mainly due to their ability to handle semi-structured, unstructured and variable data.
• With the proliferation of self-service tools, forecasting and predictive analytics are becoming the order of the day.
• Organizations are looking to stay ahead of the game with comprehensive BI solutions that process information from multiple sources and in multiple views. Big data is a buzz word among business leaders and interests in it has grown at a phenomenal 60% rate.

As per Gartner research, the below are the major highlights with regards to Business Intelligence (Analytics tools)

• By 2017, most data discovery tools will have incorporated smart data discovery capabilities to expand the reach of interactive analysis.
• Through 2016, less than 10% of self-service Business intelligence initiatives will be governed sufficiently to prevent inconsistencies that adversely affect the business.

Analytics – When number crunching is inevitable

Analytics usually involves finding out past historical data points to analyze potential trends for future use. It will also help in investigating the past results or events, or to gauge the performance of a given business scenario or context.

The following are the key aspects for the demand for business intelligence tools.

• To Access Data
• To Analyze
• To Govern
• To Share information

The goal of analytics is to improve the business by gaining knowledge, which can be used to make improvements or changes.

War is ninety percent information.

Napoleon, Military leader

Moving from Traditional form of Analytics

In the last two decades, Microsoft Excel has been the ideal platform to perform dash boarding, analysis and getting insightful data. Excel is the format of choice for CXO’s, Entrepreneurs, Academicians, financial analysts, to marketing and sales executives, as they are easy to share and modify.

However, as the data started to increase and as the requirements to analyze complex information started to grow, companies have slowly moved to Business intelligence tools.

As per the latest survey report from Gartner, SAP, SAS, IBM, Microstrategy and Oracle are some of the leading names, which are providing BI software

Why is Business analytics in such a great demand?

Most of the companies wish to deploy business intelligence software or analytics tools as a technology initiative.

Secondly, information from devices such as mobiles, machines, cloud and social / collaboration is creating tons of information. The amount of data is doubling year after year.

The use of business analytics is growing rapidly across several industries like Information technology, e-Commerce, Healthcare, Law enforcement, Biotechnology and Human resource management.

Companies, which are data centric like banking, insurance and capital markets produce loads of information. For them, it becomes an absolutely essential for implementing the right analytics solutions for their growth and sustainability.

In the final analysis, this quote by the late management guru, Peter Drucker, represents why most firms invest in analytics. If you are not measuring your digital initiatives, how can you manage or optimize them? And you would be right to note that just because you measure something does not guarantee that you will actually manage it; however, measurement is the starting point.

Clearly, the life cycle of data is far richer than just analyzing information. The convergence of several social, technological, and behavioral trends are defining new ways to interact with data and people. Will you and your business be ready?