A sample Google Analytics dashboard. Tools like this help businesses identify trends and make decisions.
Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance. Analytics often favors data visualization to communicate insight.
Firms may commonly apply analytics to business data, to describe, predict, and improve business performance. Specifically, arenas within analytics include enterprise decision management, retail analytics, store assortment and SKU optimization, marketing optimization and marketing mix analytics, web analytics, sales force sizing and optimization, price and promotion modeling, predictive science, credit risk analysis, and fraud analytics. Since analytics can require extensive computation (See Big Data), the algorithms and software used for analytics harness the most current methods in computer science, statistics, and mathematics.[1]
Analytics vs. analysis
Analytics is a two-sided coin. On one side, it uses descriptive and predictive models to gain valuable knowledge from data - data analysis. On the other, analytics uses this insight to recommend action or to guide decision making - communication. Thus, analytics is not so much concerned with individual analyses or analysis steps, but with the entire methodology. There is a pronounced tendency to use the term analytics in business settings e.g. text analytics vs. the more generic text mining to emphasize this broader perspective.
Examples
Marketing optimization
Marketing has evolved from a creative process into a highly data-driven process. Marketing organizations use analytics to determine the outcomes of campaigns or efforts and to guide decisions for investment and consumer targeting. Demographic studies, customer segmentation, conjoint analysis and other techniques allow marketers to use large amounts of consumer purchase, survey and panel data to understand and communicate marketing strategy.
Web analytics allows marketers to collect session-level information about interactions on a website. Those interactions provide the web analytics information systems with the information to track the referrer, search keywords, IP address, and activities of the visitor. With this information, a marketer can improve the marketing campaigns, site creative content, and information architecture.
Analysis techniques frequently used in marketing include marketing mix modeling, pricing and promotion analyses, sales force optimization, customer analytics e.g.: segmentation. Web analytics and optimization of web sites and online campaigns now frequently works hand in hand with the more traditional marketing analysis techniques. A focus on digital media has slightly changed the vocabulary so that marketing mix modeling is commonly referred to as attribution modeling in the digital or mixed-media context.
These tools and techniques support both strategic marketing decisions (such as how much overall to spend on marketing and how to allocate budgets across a portfolio of brands and the marketing mix) and more tactical campaign support in terms of targeting the best potential customer with the optimal message in the most cost effective medium at the ideal time.
Portfolio analysis
A common application of business analytics is portfolio analysis. In this, a bank or lending agency has a collection of accounts of varying value and risk. The accounts may differ by the social status (wealthy, middle-class, poor, etc.) of the holder, the geographical location, its net value, and many other factors. The lender must balance the return on the loan with the risk of default for each loan. The question is then how to evaluate the portfolio as a whole.
The least risk loan may be to the very wealthy, but there are a very limited number of wealthy people. On the other hand there are many poor that can be lent to, but at greater risk. Some balance must be struck that maximizes return and minimizes risk. The analytics solution may combine time series analysis, with many other issues in order to make decisions on when to lend money to these different borrower segments, or decisions on the interest rate charged to members of a portfolio segment to cover any losses among members in that segment.
Risk analytics
Predictive models in banking industry is widely developed to bring certainty across the risk scores for individual customers. Credit scores are built to predict individual’s delinquency behaviour and also scores are widely used to evaluate the credit worthiness of each applicant and rated while processing loan applications.
Challenges
In the industry of commercial analytics software, an emphasis has emerged on solving the challenges of analyzing massive, complex data sets, often when such data is in a constant state of change. Such data sets are commonly referred to as big data. Whereas once the problems posed by big data were only found in the scientific community, today big data is a problem for many businesses that operate transactional systems online and, as a result, amass large volumes of data quickly.[2]
The analysis of unstructured data types is another challenge getting attention in the industry. Unstructured data differs from structured data in that its format varies widely and cannot be stored in traditional relational databases without significant effort at data transformation.[3] Sources of unstructured data, such as email, the contents of word processor documents, PDFs, geospatial data, etc., are rapidly becoming a relevant source of business intelligence for businesses, governments and universities.[4] For example, in Britain the discovery that one company was illegally selling fraudulent doctor's notes in order to assist people in defrauding employers and insurance companies,[5] is an opportunity for insurance firms to increase the vigilance of their unstructured data analysis. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that big data analysis could save the American health care system $300 billion per year and the European public sector €250 billion.[6]
These challenges are the current inspiration for much of the innovation in modern analytics information systems, giving birth to relatively new machine analysis concepts such as complex event processing, full text search and analysis, and even new ideas in presentation.[7] One such innovation is the introduction of grid-like architecture in machine analysis, allowing increases in the speed of massively parallel processing by distributing the workload to many computers all with equal access to the complete data set.[8]
One more emerging challenge is dynamic regulatory needs. For example, in the banking industry, Basel III and future capital adequacy needs are likely to make even smaller banks adopt internal risk models. In such incidents, cloud computing and open source R can help smaller banks to adopt risk analytics and support branch level monitoring by applying predictive analytics.[citation needed]
See also
References
- ^ Kohavi, Rothleder and Simoudis (2002). "Emerging Trends in Business Analytics". Communications of the ACM 45 (8): 45–48.
- ^ Naone, Erica. "The New Big Data". Technology Review, MIT. Retrieved August 22, 2011.
- ^ Inmon, Bill (2007). Tapping Into Unstructured Data. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-236029-6.
- ^ Wise, Lyndsay. "Data Analysis and Unstructured Data". Dashboard Insight. Retrieved February 14, 2011.
- ^ "Fake doctors' sick notes for Sale for £25, NHS fraud squad warns". London: The Telegraph. Retrieved August 2008.
- ^ "Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity as reported in Building with Big Data". The Economist. May 26, 2011. Archived from the original on 3 June 2011. Retrieved May 26, 2011.
- ^ Ortega, Dan. "Mobililty: Fueling a Brainier Business Intelligence". IT Business Edge. Retrieved June 21, 2011.
- ^ Khambadkone, Krish. "Are You Ready for Big Data?". InfoGain. Retrieved February 10, 2011.
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