Using Data to Build Business Practice

Using data to build business
practice

Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
Analysing the data provided in order to gain an understanding of the pattern of barriers to take
up and use of business support....................................................................................................1
Highlighting interesting findings.................................................................................................8
Recommendations about areas which require further support....................................................9
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
Using data to build business practice is the process which is referred as data analysis. This
process is used by business organisations, investigators and individuals to analyse the data so
that it can be helpful in decision making. There are various methods and approaches which can
be used to analyse the data; these methods varies according to the nature of data and the aim
behind analysing the data. The main aim of this present report is to identify the data requirements
and then communicate the data findings to the audience.
For the completion of above aim, a data set is provided which belongs to BIS; this is
important to consider that BIS is a department of business innovation and skills which helps
business organisation to survive and grow in competitive market by using innovation. In this
report, the data set is first analysed to conduct a comparison between South East and North West
region by identifying the barriers which limits business owners to take up business support from
external professional services. This analysis is then interpreted to identify interesting findings
and recommendations for the areas that require further support.
Comparison between South East and North West region
Analysing the data provided in order to gain an understanding of the pattern of barriers to take up
and use of business support
Data analysis is a complex procedure which is divided into three steps which are pre
processing the data, analysing the data and lastly visualising the data. For present report, it is
important to compare the data between two regions for which it is essential to first generate the
familiarity with the data.
The data set which has been provided is BIS data that has been collected from a total of
1203 respondents; these respondents are business owners who own a small data. These owners
are asked 6 set of questions, while each set includes numerous sub questions. The last question
that has been asked from these business owners is about the region in which their business is
operating. In order to compare the two provided regions, it is significant to first clean the data to
the extent of these regions only. The data cleaning functions in Microsoft Excel are Filtering,
Sorting etc. Among these functions, the function of Filter is used the Region (3 and 6) filter is
applied to the entire data. The Region 3 is denoted as South East and region 6 is denoted as East
West. This cleaned data is then transferred to a new excel sheet, where decisions about selecting
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the appropriate variables or questions are taken. The comparison between the two regions is
required to be conducted on the basis of barriers which are the reasons behind people do not took
business support. So, considering this, the variables that are selected are all directly related to the
barriers. The variable names that are selected are Q3_1, Q3_3, Q3_5, Q3_7, Q3_33D, Q4_3A_2,
Q4_3A_3, Q4_3A_8, URBANRURAL_2 and REGION.
As the data has been cleaned, it is essential to reduce the data, the variable which are
selected above are now used to reduce the entire data. Excel function which is used to reduce the
data is Pivot table. As, the data has been pre processed, it will now be analysed and visualised.
The first variable which has been analysed is Region by considering URBANRURAL_2 as
a classification variable. This analysis is presented below by using data acquired from pivot table
and a bar graph for effective visualisation.
Row Labels South East North West Grand Total
Urban 166 121 287
Rural 56 28 84
Grand Total 222 149 371
The above analysis provides the clear interpretation that the number of busineses in South
East region is much higher than North West. The total number of businesses in both of these
regions which were the part of this survey are 371; among these 222 are carried out in South East
and 149 are carried out in North West region. The further classification of UrbanRural presents
that even after having high number of urban and rural businesses in South East region, the ratio
of having urban businesses is higher in North West which is a point of difference in both of these
regions.
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