What You Can Do with Analytics

Analytics can answer information-oriented questions like what happened, say, in the past two years with sales in a particular region (as can BI). But it can also answer questions like, how are current product sales in each region? And, what are sales likely to be in six months? Digging deeper may provide insights regarding how and why certain things happened. Of course, answering these questions may require some mathematical modeling and/or experimental design.

Analytics can also help answer insightful questions like, what is the best action to take next? Or, what is the best or worst that can happen in this particular scenario? Analytics aim to move toward more insightful answers to the problems or questions that an organization needs to know to stay healthy and ahead of competition. It’s about informed decision making rather than intuitive decision making. It’s also about reducing the risks in decision making and providing managers with a potent competitive advantage. An analytics consultant can be involved in this process to suggest how a company can make their data more useful. Or an IT manager can take the role of the analyst who studies the data and statistics to churn out useful intelligence.