Business Analy cs – Assignment 1

Name: Charumathi Kubendiran

Student ID No: 2217687

Assignment Ques on: Explain what is Business Analy cs according to your Understanding

The term Business Analy cs and Big data is widely used in the technological era and various
other business sectors. Let’s see what is business analy cs, how it helps the business
organiza ons in various sectors.
Business Analy cs is synonymously used with Ar ficial Intelligence, Big Data Analy cs, Machine
Learning.
It involves tools & Techniques to turn data into business insight.
Defini on:

Business Analy cs can be defined as the broad use of data and quan ta ve analysis for decision
making within organiza on. (As defined by Thomas H.Davenport )
In Simple words, gain an insight from the available data and use it in business to make more
profits and make the business more efficient.

Methodology:
 Iden fying the business problem and we are trying to solve it
 Analyze the problem, es mate the effort and build a business case
At this point we need to check on the availability of data, how reliable the data is and its
correctness, Granularity of the data and the frequency of its availability

 Now the data needs to be processed by storing, analyzing and interpret it.

Different Types of Analy cs:

  Descrip ve Analy cs – What Happened?
 Predic ve Analy cs – What Might Happen?
 Prescrip ve Analy cs – What should we do?

Descrip ve Analy cs
Descrip ve Analysis is summarizing the data using tools like Excel & Pivot and other tools,
iden fying trends, rela onships and pa erns with these data.
Conver ng the raw data available into an easy and understandable format.
To make this raw data into a more structured way Sta s cal tools like Measures of frequency,
Central Tendency, dispersion /Varia on and posi on are used.
Predic ve Analy cs

We can say that analy cs is maturing in this stage as to data being transformed into
informa on -Knowledge -Insight.
Now this insight is used in the business to gain profit and improve its efficacies.
Predic ve Analysis is all about answering What will happen? when it will happen? in the
future.
Examples:
A general grocery store predic ng how much inventory is required for its various products.
What will be the demand of these products has to be predicted.
Pa ent predic ng what will be the success ra o of his surgery in a par cular hospital.

Prescrip ve Analy cs
Now based on the predic ons made we can make prescrip ons. We might recommend some
decisions based on some op miza on models rendering solu on to the business.

With Business Analy cs we provide recommenda ons and not just informa on out of data
collected.
Ac onable Recommenda ons should be provided to add more value supported by the data we
collected.
Challenges:
 Collec on of data can cost more to the company
 Data received can be unstructured and requires lot of cleaning with more me and
effort being required
 Good analy cs doesn’t necessarily solve the business problems.

References:
Defini on Reference: h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_H._Davenport