The power of Analytics

The scenario of Business Intelligence has shifted drastically, with news concepts, approaches and tools, and one of the most interesting and powerful is the concept of analytics.

A good definition of analytics, according Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris, in their excellent book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning: "By Analytics we mean the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions. The analytics may be input for human decisions or may drive fully automated decisions. Analytics are a subset of what has come to be called Business Intelligence: a set of technologies and processes that use data to understand and analyze business performance."

Although the idea of analytics is not so new, only lately are appearing new approaches and tools to use. Analytical cultures and processes are appearing in any business that can use extensive data, fact-based decision making and complex statistical processing. Analytics don't only will support competitive strategies, but increasingly will perform a primary role.

The important factors to apply a successful analytics in the companies are:
- The companies need to have committed executives, that should be believers in analytical and fact-based decision making, appreciate the methods and analytical tools, and willing to act on the results of analyses.
- Build a sustainable pipeline of projects and analytical technologies to analytical groups.
- Bridging business analysis and technical development
- The companies need the availability of sufficient volumes of high-quality data, to have conditions to do sophisticated analytics.

The future of Analytics

The future of Analytics will happen through three type of changes: technology-driven, human-driven and strategy-driven. The technology-driven change include pervasive BI software, more real-time analytics , more automated decisions and increasing use supercomputers optimized for business intelligence applications, more visual analytics, more mining of texts, and more prediction with less reporting. The human-driven change is mainly because the companies need greater numbers of analytically oriented people. The strategy-driven change is because the companies will need to push the boundaries of analytics in their products, service and business models. The number of changes in the analytical environment will be driven by business strategies.