Conventional views of BA are concerned in some way with operating on data, with an aim of

supporting business activities (e.g., decision making). The operations may involve
examination, calculation, or inference. Business Analytics (BA) is the process whereby an
organisation’s data is explored and analysed with results used to understand business
performance and/or used to assist in making business decisions. Business analytics uses results
from data analysis to: The use of Analytics by business can be found as far back as the
19th century, when Frederick Winslow Taylor initiated time management exercises. Another
example is when Henry Ford measured the speed of assembly lines. In the late 1960s, Analytics
began receiving more attention as computers became decision-making support systems. With
the development of Big Data, Data Warehouses, the Cloud, and a variety of software and
hardware, Data Analytics has evolved, significantly.

• Inform on business decisions

• Better understand business performance
• Predict future business outcomes

Various milestone developments generated are solving the shortest-path problem which
transformed routing and logistics (1956), FICO’s use of predictive modeling to assess credit
risk (1958), the Black–Scholes model for optimal stock options pricing (1973), and the release
of Visicalc, the first commercial tool for model-based decision support system (DSS)
development (1979). The term Business Intelligence (BI) was first used in 1865, and was later
adapted by Howard Dresner at Gartner in 1989, to describe making better business decisions
through searching, gathering, and analyzing the accumulated data saved by an organization.
Using the term “Business Intelligence” as a description of decision-making based on data
technologies was both novel and far-sighted. Large companies first embraced BI in the form
of analyzing customer data systematically, as a necessary step in making business decisions.
The typical setup for a BI system centers on a large data store holding highly structured data –
typically in the form of data warehouses and/or data marts. technological aspects of analytics
are rooted in the decision support capabilities provided by business intelligence. But, business
analytics has other roots. Along with applied statistics, this is where quantitative aspects of
analytics are grounded – methods for building quantitative representations of situations (i.e.,
mathematical and statistical models), calculating solutions to such models (typically,
technology assisted), and interpreting the results. Their data may be non-numeric and their
solutions may rely on logic, reasoning, inference, and collaboration. As technology progressed
throughout the mid-20th century, computers played a huge role in the advancement of business
analytics with the introduction of Decision Support Systems in the 1970's. Data warehouses
also became popular during this time to help organize large amounts of data, the first iteration
of today's server farms. Up until the 21st century, most analytics were applied to the upper
levels of enterprises and corporations.