Business Analytics: Process, Potential Applications, and Limitations

Running head: BUSINESS ANALYTICS
BUSINESS ANALYTICS
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1BUSINESS ANALYTICS
Executive Summary
Business analytics is defined as the process of iterative exploration of business datasets with an
intension of statistical analysis. Data are considered as corporate asset and are gripped to gain
competitive advantage. The process needs skilled analysts with an idea about business needs and
has technology understandings, proper data quality and relevance and commitment of the
organization for data based decision makings. There is a subtle difference between business
intelligence and business analytics. Business intelligence provides an insight about present
business conditions and business analytics provides an idea or insight about future event. Data
driven decision making is the need of the time to gain a competitive advantage for a company. It
can be used in various sectors like finance sector, sales prediction, market prediction, customer
segmentation and risk assessment. The process has certain disadvantages as well. Since it is a
complete data driven process, proper data collection and storage is an important criteria. There
are few more problems regarding data related matters like transferability of data and security of
it.

2BUSINESS ANALYTICS
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Current state of the technology........................................................................................................3
Potential application and disruptive effect of the technology.........................................................3
Limitations of the technology..........................................................................................................3
Active link.......................................................................................................................................3
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................3
Reference.........................................................................................................................................4

3BUSINESS ANALYTICS
Introduction
Business analytics is today’s business need. It is defined as the process of iterative
exploration of business datasets with an intension of statistical analysis (Evans & Lindner, 2012).
Data are considered as information mine for data driven companies. Business analytics provides
with insights that help in informed and optimized decision making to gain a competitive
advantage. The process needs skilled analysts with an idea about business needs and has
technology understandings, proper data quality and relevance and commitment of the
organization for data based decision makings. There is a subtle difference between business
intelligence and business analytics. Business intelligence evaluate past data and may be present
data as well and provides an insight about present business conditions abut business analytics
concentrates on evaluating past data and present one and provides an idea or insight about future
events.
Current state of the technology
Consumer data are increasing exponentially now a day. Estimates show that there is a
growth rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day (Paradigm Technology, 2006). Social media
can be considered as the base for this data growth and provide an amazingly detailed data set that
contains information regarding daily activity or even per minute activity of a person ((Kohavi,
Rothleder & Simoudis, 2002)).
Business firms are interested at turning these data sources into valuable information
sources and this transformation is possible through business analytics and through choosing a