Business Analytics (BA) is the process whereby an organisation’s data is explored and analysed with results used to understand business performance and/or used to assist in making business decisions.
Increasingly, business analytics are tied to or confused with Big Data Analytics. However, whilst BA can use big data sets, it does not have to be. BA can be conducted using structured data from traditional data sources.
Business analytics uses results from data analysis to:
1. Inform on business decisions
2. Better understand business performance
3. Predict future business outcomes
To perform successful business analytics, certain criteria should be in place.
1. Adequate amounts of high quality data
2. People with analytical skills to query data effectively
3. Management and Executives committed to a data driven approach
4. Software tools to undertake the analytics process.
Business Analytics can also be categorised in two ways – historical for analysis and current for prediction.
Business Intelligence tools have long been used to analyse historical data. This is still an important part of Business Analytics that can provide deep insight into how elements of the business have or are performing.
Statistical analytics look at current data and applies algorithms to draw predictive conclusions. This is a more recent development in business analytics and requires people with the correct skills to maximise accuracy of results.
SAS is an example of a company with a heritage in analytics that has developed technology to keep pace with the analytics needs of today. The demands of modern day business require analytics solutions that enable collaboration across entire organisations from executive to data scientist, and scalability to meet the rapid data growth. To meet that need, SAS launched SAS Viya, and open cloud enabled platform to support the modern-day business analytics requirements.
For more information please download DSA Spotlight on SAS Viya
