What is Analytics?

Analytics is the science of uncovering deeper, hidden relationships from within data to make more efficient and effective decisions. It is:

• Targeted at business managers
• Response application oriented i.e. instead of simply informing it calls to action
• Predictive or, at a minimum, aimed at responding to unforeseen events and revealing new insights, and unexpected discoveries
• Helping business leaders to ask and answer the right questions without upfront huge investments in implementing business intelligence capabilities
• Exploratory & iterative and not limited to the analysis of data pre-programmed into a warehouse

Business analytics is more than just traditional business intelligence & reporting.

While traditional Business Intelligence is:

• Oriented to standard and consistent metrics and analysis
• Focused on dashboards and predefined reports
• Primarily answers predefined questions
• Provides end users indirect raw data access through cubes, reports, and summarized data
• Exception based reporting

Business Analytics differs markedly by being:

• Oriented towards ad-hoc analysis of past performance (Continuous)
• Focused on interactive and investigative analysis by end users
• Used to derive new insights and understanding (Iterative)
• Explore the unknown and discover new patterns (exploratory)
• Relies on low-level data to provide visibility to unexpected activity

In short, business analytics is a continuous, iterative, exploratory, and investigative analysis of past performance to gain insight and drive business planning.