Why Business Analytics?

In mystery movies, detectives typically uncover clues and crack a code to make a striking discovery.

Interestingly, businesses do similar detective work to understand what their customers want from a product or service and what changes the company should make as a whole in order to improve.

For businesses, there are clues to help understand how the business is performing. These clues are often pieces of information about how customers and users engage with the business, how websites function, or other bits of collected information. This information is called data, and businesses put effort into collecting, analyzing, and gaining insight from this data in the same way that a detective would collect, analyze, and gain insight from clues and evidence. Data is a collection of information that can be manipulated, organized, and processed.

Data is highly valuable to a business, but not everyone knows how to extract the value from data. Due to the growth of data creation, the need for workplace expertise on how to collect, engage with, and analyze data has skyrocketed. Businesses collect and process data in order to inform decision-making, and this requires knowledgeable employees (like you!) to make it happen.

Data is powerful because it provides companies with the information they need to understand what customers want and, in turn, how to improve their business. Data that has not been analyzed or manipulated, however, can be meaningless. Data professionals translate the data into information that can be understood by others in the business, regardless of their data expertise.

Analytics is the process of discovering and interpreting meaning from data. The goal of analytics is to discover patterns and trends that businesses can use to take informed actions. The actionable trends and patterns uncovered through analysis are called insights. Insights are very valuable. They are the main reason data is collected so ubiquitously and why data professionals are in such high demand. Everyone wants insights from data, but not everyone has the skill set to get them.

Business analytics uses data and reporting to investigate a business's performance to discover insights and make data-driven decisions and is performed by a business intelligence analyst. In the upcoming sections, you'll delve deeper into this pivotal role.