What is business analytics and its types?

Business analytics refers to the techniques and methods that companies use in order to measure their business performance. It’s comprised of quantitative methods that are applicable to particular products, processes, or projects. It’s useful in evaluating both the specific aspects of the business and the entire company itself.

You can use business analytics to highlight significant data that has a plethora of use cases. For instance, it’s helpful in determining the weakness that your current processes possess. It also provides information that organizations can use to deal with present issues and future similar problems.

However, business analytics’ most common use is to generate insights that help in making a smarter business decision. This makes it popular among companies that are dedicated to making strongly data-driven choices. They consider data as part of their asset which they actively mine for ways to turn into a tangible edge.

Many experts aren’t clear on where to draw the line that separates business analytics and business intelligence. In fact, business intelligence solutions are usually the systems used for both BI and business analytics needs. However, all experts agree that the two are highly connected and their process for providing businesses with insights is entwined. Together, they provide organizations with a holistic view of all data in order to make the best business decisions.

Benefits of business analytics

Business analytics benefits impact every corner of your organization. When data across departments consolidates into a single source, it syncs up everyone in the end-to-end process. This ensures there are no gaps in data or communication, thus unlocking benefits such as:

Data-driven decisions: With business analytics, hard decisions become smarter—and by smart, that means that they are backed up by data. Quantifying root causes and clearly identifying trends creates a smarter way to look at the future of an organization, whether it be HR budgets, marketing campaigns, manufacturing and supply chain needs, or sales outreach programs.

Easy visualization: Business analytics software can take unwieldy amounts of data and turn it into simple-yet-effective visualizations. This accomplishes two things. First, it makes insights much more accessible for business users with just a few clicks. Second, by putting data in a visual format, new ideas can be uncovered simply by viewing the data in a different format.

Modeling the what-if scenario: Predictive analytics creates models for users to look for trends and patterns that will affect future outcomes. This previously was the domain of experienced data scientists, but with business analytics software powered by machine learning, these models can be generated within the platform. That gives business users the ability to quickly tweak the model by creating what-if scenarios with slightly different variables without any need to create sophisticated algorithms.

Go augmented: All of the points above consider the ways that business data analytics expedite user-driven insights. But when business analytics software is powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, the power of augmented analytics is unlocked. Augmented analytics uses the ability to self-learn, adapt, and process bulk quantities of data to automate processes and generate insights without human bias.