Business Analytics is a discipline wherein unstructured business data is assimilated and organized before being precisely analyzed through a wide variety of statistical methods. Business analytics combines the study of information sciences and statistics to ensure that business decisions are made through a data driven approach. Today, organizations consider data as a prized asset and leverage the power of data and insights obtained from the data to their competitive advantage. While, the data used for analysis can be derived from a wide variety of sources, the challenge is to ensure how the data is used to formulate strategies for business success.

To understand the importance of the business analytics, it is also important to understand the scope of business analytics in terms its applications and usage. Business analytics as a discipline can be used to arrive at an analysis which may either one of the three viz. descriptive analysis, predictive analysis and prescriptive analysis. A descriptive analysis can help a company assess its market position which has resulted in decision made and implemented in the past. Thus, a descriptive analysis provides an insight into the past and present situation of a company. A predictive analysis helps a company assess past data and to draw a pattern which helps to identify risks and opportunities using the relationship of the data and various parameters. A prescriptive or decision analysis provides a data driven decision which also includes the possible outcome of the decision being taken.

With the understanding that business analytics helps decision makers in an organization to make an informed decision, the following points are the reasons why business analytics as a discipline is gaining so much importance.

1. Cost Consciousness:

Insights received from business analytics related statistical analytics can provide a good overview of the financial position of the organization in terms of base working capital, cash flows and the like. While the concept of fail fast, fail cheap is well known, business analytics can quantify for an organization the definition of fast and cheap.

2. Efficient decision making:

The data driven decision making ability provided by business analytics enables an organization to make decisions rationally and swiftly. Critical business operations of an organization can be monitored using the factual insights, thereby ensuring strategic and timely decision making.

3. Customer Centricity:

Business Analytics insights allow organizations to use customer analytics to identify target customers, quantify customer acquisition cost and customer conversion costs, customer likes and dislikes, and many such customer driven parameters. This allow organizations to drive decision relating to providing hyper personalized products based on customer preferences.

4. Competition Insights:

There is a high possibility that a highly personalized product may fail if an organization has ignored insights on the competition in the market. The data driven approach of business analytics helps organizations to identify and categorize competitors based on their strengths and weakness and further define risks and opportunities.

In today’s age of the digital and data driven economy, the importance of Business Analytics cannot be stressed enough. Business Analytics as a discipline is driving change in a large number of organization around the globe and changing decision making in an organization with a view on the inside as well as on the outside.

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